DISCOVERY

Discovery notes
===============
by neagix

This document is kept as a diary of what I discover in the code during development.

See also old/DevelopmentDiary-till-2004.txt for the original development diary.

2013-04-23
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Modularity is not enforced.

From a comment: Pressing insert in debug mode turns on automated testing

2013-04-24
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Most of the fan-made content is lost e.g. mods, packs etc
I am trying to recover it.

There should be an input playback feature to create sort of unit tests, this way we
can serialize testing for specific issues, spot regressions but also improve playback

Configuration shall be loaded from ini file, no need to load any existing options.bin

Compatibility to old SMW directory paths shall be preserved at least till 2.0.

numeric indexes in the .txt files shall be replaced by enum constants (like Music Category, etc)

Replacing 'rand() %' with properly uniform distributed function GetRandMax()

Adding preliminary support for bigger screen resolutions (might not work e.g. no big enough maps or missing scrolling support)

AI-controlled players :)

better sound for eggs game

bomb explosion -> smaller

AI should have a short memory to detect if the approach is not working out, then randomly change it

TODO lists should be unified into a current one

All conversions of pre 1.8 maps shall be supported (on-the-fly) at least till 2.0

Pre 1.9 maps (640x480) will play with a frame when played at higher resolution

Only 800x600 shall be supported as new resolution (for now).

Pre 1.9 maps shall be supported, but converted on-the-fly to human-readable format (only when accessing in directory mode)
Tiled's TMX is a good candidate
Long term features
------------------
* Lua scripting language support
* Network play (LAN)
* Tiled support

Data directory structure
------------------------

As I understand there is 'packs' structure under:

- gfx/packs/
- music/game/ and music/world/
- sfx/packs/

These should all be made modular, so that core game graphics are separated (for example level editor graphics)
while game specific packs made selectable. There could be the following types of packages:

- overlay package, this is a container that contains dependency to 1 gfx package, at least 1 game music package, at least 1 world music package, at least 1 sfx package and at least 1 character package)
-- gfx package (this is also a 'game skin' thing)
-- game music package
-- world music package
-- sfx package
-- character package (that replaces current 'skin' PNGs and opens possibility for extension with character properties)

Items with double dashes '--' have in theory dependency with above item. By making packages individual (as per above) we can effectively use overlays in a great way.
Overlay packages can also have any custom file that overrides existing files. The loading mechanism will not load the underlying file when there is already same file in overlay.

All packages shall be cached locally (in .smw/packagesCache directory for example) and be managed through online server (HTTP/HTTPS)
Packages shall be cached as .zip, but for development purposes also directories shall be supported
Packages shall also have version number, always the latest version is used of any package.

Known issues
------------

Throws exception after exiting, possibly due to memory corruption of some brave new/delete operation.
There are many weird code smells.
I did not yet start reading the TODO to check what's missing and what not.