My Personal To-Do List

[_L_]

I have to confess: my current priority task has been playing... er, researching a certain quest called "Twilight Princess" (What? ZC developers are required to be all up ins on the canonical games!) But rest assured that working on ZC isn't far from my conscience. I mean, mind. So, in the interests of full transparency, here's my list of things I'm personally ensuring will be in 2.5.

Also, I hereby assert that, until the final 2.5 is released, I will only work on these tasks, and I will not add tasks to this list.*

Note: these are, in fact, subject to cancellation if I deem it necessary.
Note 2: hey, other developers, I won't take offense if you decide to implement any one of these yourselves after deciding that I'm being too laid-back and summertime about them. The previous sentence is not reverse psychology.

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* Bottomless Pits and Drowning (currently in progress)
Rating: Mostly Easy
Desirability: High
Chances of producing difficult bugs: Mostly low

This requires one new Link sprite, one new combo, and one quest rule. The tricky part is getting the Stepladder to work. (If put under pressure, I'll just have to make the Stepladder incompatable with them...)

* Sideview Stepladder (currently in progress)
Rating: Easy
Desirability: Medium
Chances of producing difficult bugs: Low

Link can use the stepladder on the edges of platforms in sideview. This lets him cross one-block gaps, or shorten a gap which he must jump over. This would also entail some MISC: sprites depicting the ladder (and, while I'm at it, the raft) when viewed side-on.

* Choose fonts in the String Editor
Rating: Easy
Desirability: High
Chances of producing difficult bugs: Minimal

This requires a font-selecting menu similar to that in the Subscreen Editor. The slightly tricky part will be making that font displayed in the preview pane. (Owing to the nature of jwin, this information isn't immediately "visible" to the preview pane code.)

* A few more String Control Codes
Rating: Easy
Desirability: Mostly low (I've made the most vital codes already.)
Chances of producing difficult bugs: Low

People have asked for a "Give item" code, but I'm also thinking of a "Player name" code, where the name of the player's save file is inserted into the string at runtime.

* Translucent string panes
Rating: ???
Desirability: Medium
Chances of producing difficult bugs: ???

I'll have to look a little harder at maps.cpp before I can gauge the difficulty of this.

* Signpost combos
Rating: Easy
Desirability: Required!
Chances of producing difficult bugs: Low

This requires six new combos ("Signposts A-F",) and five new Message Strings per screen. When you walk into a signpost combo, the appropriate screen message string is displayed.

* Ladder combo
Rating: Easy
Desirability: Required!
Chances of producing difficult bugs: Low

This requires one new combo which enforces restrictions on Link's movement when he's on it, and one new Link sprite.

* Bugfixes (yes, this is in progress as well, of course.)
Rating: n/a
Desirability: Required!
Chances of producing difficult bugs: n/a

This is the domain of all developers. However, I suppose I ought to take more responsibility for bugs of my own doing.

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COMPLETED TASKS:


* Solid Damage Combos
Rating: Mostly Easy
Desirability: Medium
Chances of producing difficult bugs: Low

I can already make solid damage combos that hurt Link when he walks into them straight-on. The slightly annoying part is dealing with diagonal movement, as well as "shimmying" along a row of them - but nothing that about an hour's work couldn't overcome.

* Quest Rule: Messages disappear

When this rule is set, pressing the A button when a completed string is onscreen makes the string disappear. (What it will actually do is make the string "Next" to the zero string.)

* Making the Lens of Truth sounds play when you toggle it on and off.
Rating: ???
Desirability: Mostly low
Chances of producing difficult bugs: Minimal


* Making the screen shake when you use the quake hammer.
Rating: ???
Desirability: Mostly low
Chances of producing difficult bugs: Minimal


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If you wish to argue for the abandoning of any of the above tasks, feel free to state your case!

*Escape caveat: silly little alterations that take half an hour to implement from inception to conclusion and can be scientifically proven to be bug-free (like, for example, the Wealth Medals) don't count.

[Nimono]

Come on, _L_, just admit it: YOU'RE CAUGHT UP IN THE TP CRAZE. I, however, am not, seeing as I don't even HAVE the game. :p

Do you count the Sideview Ladder as part of the Ladder combo?

I think you should forget a few of those ideas for now. Namely, the one that allows the Quake Hammer to shake the screen. However, if you complete that, you'll only make a NEW suggestion arise- A Screen flag that makes the screen shake the moment you enter it. Then people will also bug you and the other devs for a way to deactivate and activate that Flag AT WILL with a script or something. Think Subrosia from OoS, here- Volcanoes erupted on some screens in that game, and the screens shook when they did. When they stopped erupting, the shaking stopped... until they erupted again. But yeah, unless you want people bugging you and everyone else EVEN MORE for that, don't make the Quake Hammer shake the screen unless you plan on making a Screen Flag to let us shake the screenon screen entry. :p

[_L_]

Do you count the Sideview Ladder as part of the Ladder combo?

But of course!

Also, I hesitate to call TP a "craze". But certainly it serves as a conveniently timed mass distraction from how little the ZC developers are working nowadays. The previous sentence is not not sarcastic.

[ShadowTiger]

This requires six new combos ("Signposts A-F",) and five new Message Strings per screen. When you walk into a signpost combo, the appropriate screen message string is displayed.

Only six? ... Actually, I have two suggestions for this one:

1) The general average amount of these suggested is a multiple of four, usually to both fit perfectly into the combo page, (Despite that 6x2 = 12, i.e. three rows in the combo page, if you want to make two visually separate signpost entity groups side by side in the combo page.)
2) Six doesn't fit around a screen as well as eight. (Actually six DOES "Fit" better hexagonally than octagonally, but I'm speaking in a practical view rather than a screen design view. :p )

So these messages which can be displayed when you press "A" into a signpost combo will be decided on the fourth (Or Fifth?!?) page of the Screen Flags dialog, right?

When this rule is set, pressing the A button when a completed string is onscreen makes the string disappear. (What it will actually do is make the string "Next" to the zero string.)

This will make the upper half of the screen walkable? People need some way of doing that, I think.

Oh, and a combo which goes --> Next after the string has finished displaying. :p Useful for direct autowarps to the same screen in which the string has already displayed and vanished so you're free to walk in the back of the room.

[redmage777]

* Bugfixes
Rating: n/a
Desirability: Required!
Chances of producing difficult bugs: n/a

Not discoruage you from fixing bugs, but one of Teachers used to say "Half the time, fixing old bugs leads to new bugs."

I notice the Item drop editor has been "dropped" if this is true the we will at least need some new Item sets. Namely Ammo related, And perhaps some sets centered around Item Value as well as Item Type.

[Nimono]

By the way, you're going to need more than 1 Bottomless Pit combo. You'll need different combos for the Damaging, and you'll also need some for warps. Remember, not all pits are truly bottomless! Some lead into a new screen! Same goes for drowning, too (The multiple types, that is). You'd need some that you drown in unless you have flippers, and identical ones that you drown in regardless of whether or not you have flippers. This way, we can truly recreate drowning water and LAVA. Remember, in OoA and OoS, Link "drowned" in lava, even if he had the Flippers!

[Shoelace]

Sounds good _L_. I will bugtest the heck out of them too. Hopefully like you said nothing more will be added to the list as I want this to be released soon. Anyways, one thing about the signpost is the limitation of of the combo having to be 5 tiles from the top. Because if you are 5 tiles from the top, that invisible wall will cage you in.

Edit: Oh wait, I had just though that it would most likely be the A button to get rid of the invisible wall, so maybe the invisible wouldn't get in the way on that one. I still hate it though. lol

[Freedom]

Personally I don't believe there will be a bug free stable release a year from now, even if you threw your Twilight Princess in the trash right now.
How anyone else can believe for a minute that there will be, is beyond me, it's obvious they're just not looking at the actual state of the program at this moment.

It would take an army of programmers to get all of those bugs out, and that would be IF no new ones were added.

It's been hard for me to just walk away from it after the 5 or 6 years that I've been a part of it, and given how hard I see Jman working to actually make something out of it, but I know as sure as I'm sitting here, when I pop my head back in a year from now there still won't be a solid stable BUG FREE release, so knowing that makes it a little easier.
But that's just where I'm going, to take my long vactation from this frustrating environment.
I started to tuff it out and hang around because of Jman's efforts, but the truth is, Jman can't fight both within and without, he's fighting a losing battle.
The engine, at this point, is so bad I couldn't continue with my quest even if I wanted to, so there isn't a chance in hell I'm going to start something new, and that's why I was here in the first place.
Good luck with it, even though I think it will end badly.

[DarkFlameWolf]

The item drop editor should be included with the enemy editor, would make things more flexible with the enemy editor. Wonder why it was partially made and then dropped?

[Dlbrooks33]

Most of them seem interesting and some of them I just stared at like "Who wanted that?"