[Adonthell-general] Roadmap update

[Kai Sterker]

After a successful test with diagonal walls, I believe it is safe to
go ahead and lay out the next steps. There's still the pending
separation of shadow and character, which probably also involves
creating an animation on the fly instead of loading it from a file,
but that seems more tedious than complicated to do. Thinking about the
future is more interesting at any rate, so here we go:

Contrary to what the current roadmap says (path finding next), I now
think it should be the actual map view. We need to be able to have a
map that's larger than the screen and we need to be able to load (and
save) it too. With that in place, it really would be about time to
come up with a sprite and map editor and start working on the v0.4
world map. That's something that can be fairly easily done in parallel
to the rest of the code ... and it should be done soon, as creating
all the required images and sprites will take its time.

So one priority will be to find artists. And if we find them, I think
they really want to see their work in action. Therefore, I think it's
vital to have the editors (at least partly) in place. Otherwise we end
up creating the map with a Python script like Alex did in v0.3 ;-).
And that's no fun.

Another thing that could commence once a rudimentary map is in place
would be creating the plot ... we should have a working GUI by then to
actually display dialogues (again, it's vital that writers can see
their creation in game). Again something that can be done in parallel.
But that also needs some finishing touches to dlgedit and at least a
basic quest editor as well.

Any other remaining tasks on the roadmap (path finding, RPG system,
combat, magic ...) could be implemented while the world and plot comes
into being. Care needs to be taken that we do not break data formats
(like when we add items to the map), but with a bit of foresight this
can probably be avoided.

So here's what we need:
* One or two additional programmers to work on tools and engine tasks.
* One or two artists to start working on in game graphics.
* One or two additional writers to get going on dialogues, journal
entries, item descriptions, etc ...

A v0.4 alpha 2 release will be a chance to generate more interest, but
we definitely also have to go out more actively to search for these
people. Which brings us back to the discussion we had a couple weeks
ago. Since then we had two interested programmers, which shows that
interest to help is there. If we could keep up the momentum now, I
feel pretty confident that we can reach a level of activity we last
had around 2002, before and after the 0.3.0 release.

Kai