Quote Originally Posted by Saffith View Post
I'm just not sure that's feasible for everything. For sprite types, for instance, if we want to replace the fixed-point coordinates with floating-point, the current script engine won't work with that at all.
I don't know. It probably doesn't make sense to worry about it too much at this point, anyway.
I certainly wouldn't. I'm not even sure what benefot thee would be to that conversion, to be frank. Changing from the present fixed format would sure break everything though, which is why I haven't been in favour of suggestions to do anything of the sort. I had an idea for allowing fixeds in the script lanuage, but I pretty much abandoned that after i determined just how obscene it would be to implement, versus its usefulness.

I did have ideas for how to convert the hardcoded enemies, to scripted enemies, with reasonable transparency, but no-one seemed keen to hear them out in full.


I don't disagree with any of that. I would like there to be a 2.60 (or 2.55, or whatever), and I'd like to start the branch as soon as 2.50.3 is complete. I'm already leaning toward abandoning the current rewriting effort and doing it more gradually, starting there. But the current codebase is so messy and so fragile that we're greatly limited in what we can actually do in the way of incremental upgrades without breaking a lot of existing quests, and what I absolutely do not want to do is make it worse by adding unmaintainable features and exposing more internal behavior.
Which of my routines haven't included at least some layer of abstraction, in your eyes? The return functions? That's the sort of thin that can be updated at a function level, at any time, and they work in precisely the same manner as every other return function.

Who? Where? You keep saying that, but I haven't seen any evidence of it. There've been some questions and some uncertainty, but I haven't seen any real opposition to it from anyone except you.
Well, of course not. It hasn't been discussed on a public forum, where we have most of the userbase... :p

It comes up in chat, every single time this topic is broached.

That's great, but we need more than willingness. Several people were willing to work on 2.50, and now it's an unmaintainable mess of spaghetti code.
That's valid, certainly. I fret that any attempt to clean it up is likely to (initially) do more harm, than good, as well...but there are really three options, as I see things:

1. People work together on the individual, incremental updates; you take what you can get.
2. You end up with a core version, several forks, and community splintering that the present minimal userbase cannot maintain.
3. You have a stalled project, that goes nowhere for years.

We seem mostly to be in mode 3, from that list.