2025 Roadmap

[Simon]

2017 -- 2018 -- 2020 -- 2022 -- 2023 -- 2025


UI

#496: Add flying shovel/jackhammer for basher/digger who hits steel.

Upgrade Allegro DLLs in the Windows release to 5.2.10. I forgot why I wanted that. But it's the newest version, updating is good anyway even if I don't remember why.

#400: Scissors mouse cursor: Change the mouse cursor to scissors when a click will cut the replay.

Add an icon near the mouse cursor that means insert mode. There is no obvious icon for inserting. See: Old post with icon ideas, even though these ideas were for a panel button, not for something at the mouse.

#494: Explain gadgets on mouseover (catapult, steam, trap). This is good newbie onboarding. Newbie onboarding is important; bad UX confuses newbies and they never play again.


Physics

Fix several of these bugs:

• #47 The ❤-Bug for Basher/Miner. When a basher or a miner turns at a blocker, the basher/miner won't consider the new terrain that now blocks his path. The basher/miner can clip through walls. Miners can clip through floors.
  
• #491: Jumper clips upward through terrain
  
• Basher (after lowering) clips forward through terrain. This is the same underlying bug as the ❤-Bug. Again, we put unexpected terrain in front of the basher, and the basher clips through that terrain. Here, we didn't use a blocker; we used the basher's down-stepping.
  
• Miner hovers in mid-air when he mines along a builder staircase. You can assign blocker to cancel in mid-air. The lix will then fall and revert to walker.
  
• #471: Platformer is inside his first brick. When you assign jumper at a specific time, the lix will be stuck and not jump.
  
• Remove unglitching out of wall: Ascenders travel inside the vertical wall. This requires extra code in tumbler.d to move the ascender out of terrain when something is about to fling an ascender. The ascender should take a better path outside the wall.
  
• Runners Bypass Exit, Walkers Exit: A moving lix looks for exits or triggered traps only at the end of her entire physics update, not during her path. We want to look during her entire path instead.
  

Write a manifesto on Lemmings physics. Never should a lix willfully enter terrain, unless we override it explicitly, e.g., for ascender. Never should a lix hover, unless we override it explicitly, e.g., for builder. Replace some physics primitives, e.g., scan at (x in front | y up), e.g., move ahead unconditionally, ... with higher-level commands: "walk ahead" should mean { move ahead iff you're standing on floor and there is air ahead }. Rewrite some physics in these higher-level terms. See how much of the physics will break. We can still decide if all this is too aggressive.

-- Simon