Planning for Release

I had three scrolls of enchant armor on UT level 1, and all 3 of them burned up from a booby trapped door Was that just bad luck or are scrolls much more likely to burn now?

Yeah, the scrolls should definitely burn faster. I was able to get a scroll of repair on fire from booby trapped door (these booby traps are becoming quite larger threat, with them burning everything around ), run around a level for a while, then read it to repair a cloak. It would be nice to give the player a short time to extinguish or read the scroll, but not that long.

Also, you should be harmed by wearing burning stuff. I managed to fight through most of UT 3 in burning armor, before I found out I can dip it into fountains.

On the plus side, my ring of searching burnt away! It's awsome how you can lose your equipment now! Maybe now I will actually SOCM my flammable rings!

Anyway, the fire subsystem is great. I'm really looking forward to the day wooden rooms with mines will become burning death traps!

What is a ring of searching made of?

Just to clarify, my 3 scrolls burnt up immediately from the booby trap, so I had no time at all to read them. I believe there was a message of them being "heavily burnt"

So I'm still wondering if that was just bad luck or if the fire system might have increased their likelihood of burning.

Rings of searching are made of oak wood, so it makes sense that they'd catch fire.

On a semi-related note can we make a change so you can now dip anything into liquids? It'd be much more convenient than say, smashing a bottle of water over myself to wash off assassin blood.
...or does our new update let you do that now?

I've made an issue on the repo.
The difficulty in getting this to work is that at present only a subset of objects in the game (say, meleeweapons) support the fluid subsystem. Up until now there has been no need to cover a misc item such as a ring with a liquid. Making this fire subsystem is conducive to expanding out the fluid subsystem. (Curiously, it follows that a ring made from iron does not rust, at least at present).

would it make sense to have the base material for a ring to be random, or at least randomly assigned to each game? it would be interesting to see some off the more valuable rings be occasionally made of something easily destroyed.

Now that's just cruel... I like it!

Ring materials should be able to be set the same way as any other item, so they could just be on a spectrum from wood to iron to rare metals or gems.

The only problem I have with that is, for weapons and armor, etc. you can easily identify what they are based on the shape, and the material doesn't matter. For rings, the only way you can tell what kind they are from a distance is the color (material).

Well, then we would need to add the material in the item description.

There was a little discussion on changing the way we commit stable changes and release. The proposal (which I am ok with) is to merge the dev branch into 'master', continuing development by committing future changes from periphery branches to master, and creating releases as stable branches. This workflow seems to me to be more tight knit. Are people OK with merging the 'IVAN051-develop' branch into 'master'?

The game already handles this; if an item is made of anything other than its default material then it explicitly states what it's made of.

The only time it will omit the material (such as in the case of rings) is when the item only has one possible spawn material.

What I meant was if you see a yellow ring you know that it's teleportation, blue is polymorph, red is searching (it's been a while so ironically I don't remember if those are all correct). There are a few colors that can be multiple rings but it's still nice to narrow it down. Same with the wands, you can identify which type of wand it is just by looking at the color.

Well, as I never bothered to memorize the colors of wands or rings, I always 'L'ook at them. So I would be quite OK with that change.

But that's just me refusing to remember any spoilers I can look up on wikis.

It wasn't an active attempt to memorize them, my brain just eventually associated certain colors with certain types

But of course making the material/color different each time would make the game harder, which is what IVAN is all about.

So I'm willing to be overruled, I just want to make sure everyone knows it would change more than just the appearance, it would also change your ability to spot objects from afar without having to use the 'l'ook coomand

I think the increasd difficulty is totally in the spirit of the game.

Hmm. But you can still identify the wand/ring, you just HAVE to use the 'l' ook command now instead of basing it on the color. So I don't think that adds any difficulty, just the annoyance of having to look. So I would prefer them to be a consistent material.

But then on the other hand the same thing could be said for doors - if you just kick them open you risk booby traps / enraged shop owners, while 'l'ooking can help you to avoid those kind of things...

gah I don't know

Back on the topic of releases. There was some discussion on Github here

https://github.com/Attnam/ivan/pull/21

Seems like the concensus is that Attnam/master is the working space, NOT the "stable" version. Stable versions will instead be released as tags.

I can fork Attnam/master into capristo/master and then make my own changes. After I have tested my changes, I submit a pull request to Attnam/master which is merged in so that everybody else can test.

If I have a larger feature that will take a long time to complete, I can branch my own fork into capristo/FireSystem. Then when I am comfortable with this feature being complete, I should first merge into capristo/master, and then submit a pull request as usual to Attnam/master.

Then to release specific versions, we should use git tagging because that is basically what it was built for and what Github supports out of the box. For example, after my capristo/FireSystem branch has been merged in, we tag this as version 0.51. All commits up to this point are now released as version 0.51 and can be downloaded as a zip. Then if we fix a few bugs related to the fire system, we can release this as 0.51.1. The next batch of bugs is tagged 0.51.2 and so on. Then when we add the next big feature, call it 0.52.

We should stick to semantic versioning as much as possible:

0.51.2
0 - major release
51 - minor release, increment when adding new features
2 - patch, increment when releasing bug fixes which don't add new functionality

That was designed for APIs. I am ok with using a letter to denote the patch instead, e g. 0.51a, 0.51b

Should being covered in blood have a chance to put a fire out? I noticed that after blowing myself up with a wand of fireballs that even after being coated in blood the fire remained lit; until I took the item off.

I'd prefer numbers over letters; letters just feel sort of inconsistent. Though we could do 0.51-2 style (or perhaps 0.51☭2) to add some variety to it.

☭? ☭?!

Where the hell did this delightful thing come from? ☭

That's been there.

I'm aware of that one. It's a wrinkle listed here, that needs to be ironed out at some point.

Ok we will follow semantic versioning. It's funny, I think I should have tagged the latest release as 0.50a instead of 0.51a, because it makes it seem like we have completed all our goals for 0.51.
Hey I see that we can attach issues to milestones! Cool ☭

more of a technical question : how do i adjust the resolution on the new version? I fired up the test version and the screen is tiny, My decrepit old eyes would require a magnifying glass to play.

I think the fire system is enough to warrant a 51. Maybe we should set the goal to be 0.6 instead?

Unfortunately the only two options you have out of the box are 800x600 and full screen, but SDL's full screen can get a bit wonky.

You could work around it by lowering your output resolution, but that's a pain as well.

From what I can tell SDL2 supports scaling the surface/texture, so it may be worthwhile to port IVAN up to SDL2.

Busts out the old migration guide.
Can it do smoothing as well? It would be really awesome to play in different resolutions.