Re: How to continue

[Ingo Ruhnke]

David Philippi <address@hidden> writes:

> Those tasks have two disadvantages in common:
> 
> 1. They won't be visible to the user of Pingus (except marginal performance 
>     improvements)
> 2. I don't know wheter doing this work really helps anyone or if it's useless

As long as the changes keep you at the code and give you motivation
there are ok. I mostly do such cleanup work while I work on other
parts of the code, instead of focusing directly on the cleanup.
 
> So I'd like to hear which areas of Pingus need cleanup most or what
> other tasks exist which don't require an understand of the whole
> layout (I'll be getting a sound card soon, then I may continue the
> work on the sound code). This way I could be quite sure that may
> work really does help someone. It's probably quite easy to see that
> this would increase my motivation quite a bit...

The editor needs some support for ClanGUI. Most objects currently have
some properties, which don't show up in the editor and are only
accessible via 'vim level.xml'.

Having support for manipulating surfaces in the editor would also be a
good thing, things like hflip, vflip, rotating 90, 180, 270 might not
be that difficult to integrade. Manipulating the color of surfaces
might also be possible, but a little more difficult.

See:

ftp://pingus.seul.org/pub/pingus/contrib/ideas/
http://pingus.seul.org/todo/

for some more issues that need to be resolved. Record/replay features
would also be nice to have, but depending on how power full such
features should get this could be a bit more complicated.

There is also the good old pause problem which we currently have. The
pause-button is simply too powerfull and makes gameplay rather
slow/ugly (most of the time I go pause/forward/pause/forward/...).
Solving this without completly removing the ability to pause the game
would be good, some things like bullettime, limited pause, a special
pause action for a pingu come to mind.

There are also quite a lot other gameplay issues which could need
fixing. Pingus getting stuck in walls and other such things.

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