[Enigma-devel] Re: Changes Between 0.81 And 0.92

[Tarim]

  A good philosophy for new versions (unless you're IBM or Microsoft, of 
course) is that they should be upward compatible with previous versions 
wherever possible.  It's great to introduce new features - but make it so 
that they have to specified as new objects, or new attributes - not that 
you change the default actions of existing things.

  Are there any plans for a 0.93 release which would be 0.92 with the 
original 0.81 defaults?  Or are the team all involved in more interesting 
things at the moment?  Tarim's guess is that all the problems he listed 
should be reasonably easy to set to the 0.81 defaults (with the possible 
exception of the scheduling.)  Tarim also realises that whenever anyone 
tells him that a problem is easy to fix without having looked at the code - 
he tells them to do it themselves ;-)

Andreas Lochmann wrote about tops and rotors returning to their start 
positions:
> Can't say something to this one.
> Jacob, shall we change the behaviour of the tops and
> rotors in these levels?

  It would seem more useful to use the 0.81 default, rather than ask Jacob 
- who surely isn't the only person to use tops and rotors in his levels?

Jacob Scott wrote:
> the changes between versions 0.81 and 0.92 did change a few of my levels.

> I wasn't expecting the rotors and tops to work like this in "Bizarro
> World" or "You Must Be Kidding" -- this new behavior is however
> intended in "Variety Pack" and is not much of a problem in "Bad
> Nightmare."

  (It's gratifying to know that as Tarim solved Bizarro World and You Must 
Be Kidding with the 0.81 engine and Variety Pack with the 0.92 engine - he 
did at least do them how you intended.)

  Part of the problem here is that you've used virtually the same code to 
generate the top in all three levels (is the "gohome" keyword the one you 
need?).  It's good coding practice to specify default actions rather than 
rely on them - this avoids problems when default actions change between 
versions.

> I think the accelerations in the "Nightmare" levels are more powerful
> than they used to be, so the levels are a good bit more difficult.
> "Snowing" is also quite hard, but that isn't new.

  Tarim has never managed Snowing under 0.92 and he tried it a lot.  Under 
0.81 he found it hard but eventually possible.  Mind you, he can't do the 
Nightmare levels under either version...

Ronald Lamprecht wrote:
> Nevertheless the load attribute is unnecessary in 0.92. Usage of
> "it-extinguisher_empty", "it-extinguisher_medium", "it-extinguisher" is
> preferable - the load attribute will be set to the correct values
> automatically.
>
> Martin or Raoul please change level martin95.lua.

  Surely the point here is that even if the load attribute is deprecated - 
it should still be recognised in future versions so that old levels don't 
have to be changed?


  Again, thanks to everyone who actually does the work, unlike Tarim who 
just sits around complaining about a few of the details. :-)


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