1Some of this is work in progress, and some it is just stuff I'd like to see.
2Check out <http://www.mattdm.org/icebreaker/development.html> for details.
3
4* many (65 at last count) sections of the code are marked with "FIX", in
5  places where I know I did something messy, foolish, or inefficient.
6* there are likely other bits of messiness, foolishness, and inefficiency
7  which I haven't realized are there
8* this is part of the above, but bears mentioning separately: some of the
9  code is the product of late-night hacking and, while it works fine,
10  desperately needs cleaning up
11
12For 2.0:
13- make MacOS X port
14- have a dozen themes or more (currently at nine)
15
16For 2.2: (but sooner if we're lucky):
17- find and use user's home dir on WinNT/2k/XP
18- do something sensible if selected theme is invalid
19- make it so when both lines get broken exactly at once, the second sound
20  is played with a very slight delay so that the user gets audio
21  feedback that two lives were lost
22- make spaces-in-username work -- convert to/from some special character in
23  high score file
24- make ctrl-q quit (or perhaps just q, with a confirm dialog)
25- check for high scores on 'quit' when in the midst of a game
26- option to turn off scrolling level-end text ("transitions = normal/fast")
27- more code cleanup in the event loops -- such big hairy functions....
28- "help" command line options redirected to files on win32 -- what to do
29  about that?
30- clean up intro -- remove stupid 'w' thing (either add ability to tell a
31  line to kill itself after a certain length, or add code to the intro to
32  know when to kill which lines.)
33- make the program not crash if data files can't be found. (Of course, on
34  Win32, we're SOL without the SDL DLLs anyway.)
35- make help key (F1) work in intro
36- look for themes in an os-specific directory -- ~/.icebreaker on Linux
37  (which means migrating the current ~/.icebreaker to either ~/.icebreakerrc
38  or ~/.icebreaker/icebreakerrc) -- in addition to the standard directory.
39  on BeOS, this might mean looking in the same dir in which the executable
40  resides... need to check about that.
41- make man page version of themes help?
42- unbreak BeOS port (looking to be a pain, and let's face it, this is an
43  increasingly marginal platform. even the person who did the initial port
44  doesn't actually seem to run the OS very often....)
45- ability to use bitmaps for backgrounds
46- ability to use png instead of bmp -- use SDL_image.
47
48For 3.0:
49- add music courtesy of my brother Joel at Red Reactor Sound Studio
50  <http://www.redreactor.com/> and intelligent (context-sensitive) music
51  system
52- that annoying "entire iceshelf collapses" bug is *still* there. happens
53  very very very very rarely, though, so I can't figure out what exactly
54  the problem is. probably something wrong with squarefill() or some other
55  part of checkempty() in grid.c. I tried changing a few things, but it's
56  hard to prove that the problem is solved when you can't recreate it....
57- there is a little bug where in certain situations you can start an
58  opposing line directly in the path of an oncoming line, causing lines
59  which are essentially on top of each other. Not a terribly fatal flaw,
60  but still.
61- faster better smarter collision detection (not a change to be taken
62  lightly since that's basically rewriting the core of the engine). this
63  will solve the two bugs above once and for all, and should
64  be a significant speed increase if done right. My goal is to make this
65  play on acceptably on my Toshiba Libretto CT50 (pentium 75).
66- make option parsing a bit more flexible -- gnu getopt style
67- animated sprites
68- replace randomized "demo" with a real demo that at least follows the
69  rules -- and ideally plays a decent game. random semi-AI play would be
70  great; a recording mechanism of some sort is second-best
71- make playing area able to be a bitmap instead of just a colored grid
72  (maybe lines also)
73
74Possibly:
75- convert to C++ -- reduce global variables
76- have bonus Things which get you points (or change game mechanics) for
77  trapping with a single penguin. (in a small enough space?)
78- user-definable keys
79- internationalization - translations and fonts
80- move themes to a subdir
81  a) in the source tree
82  b) in the datadir?
83
84
85Probably never:
86- make GNOME/KDE versions?
87- Mac OS 9 port?
88- the animation is really jerky with some refresh rates. what to do about
89  this? last time I wrote a game was under DOS, and you could easily
90  sync to the vertical refresh.....
91