The 450-Page TODO

Over the past couple weeks I've found myself on a new and important detour! (Surprised? Probably not :P)

I decided we'll do some feature voting here for Beta 15 (more on that later), and as I went through my incredibly lengthy primary TODO notes fishing for potential ideas to include in the list, I suddenly had the urge to do something I've never done before in Cogmind's decade-plus development history: a complete review of that document.

From 2013 to 2024, as of Beta 14's release my main notes regarding things still to do (or consider doing) ultimately spanned about 450 pages, being seriously bloated due to years of additions and modifications. Moreover, most of its content beyond near-term plans was completely unorganized. New inspiration? Interesting community discussion surrounding a useful or fun feature? Throw it somewhere on the list! Anywhere! Maybe I'll rediscover said idea at a later point when there's time or need, or when searching for relevant terms...

While having a huge stockpile of ideas to reference is nice, in this form it's certainly not very efficient if you're really hoping to do some of these things one day, considering how easy it is for topics to be buried. The size of the list just grows longer and longer, after all, there never being enough time to implement everything.

The Process

I was originally just pulling and rewriting some notes for voting features, when I realized we've really made it to an important stage in Cogmind's history, much closer to the tail end than the beginning, and I'm sure that by now there are many ideas in my notes which folks would appreciate having sooner rather than later, or have at all rather than end up not having because I simply never get around to "rediscovering" or implementing them.

So this seemed like the right opportunity to do us all a favor and pare the whole document down, simultaneously filtering and organizing the entire lot of it, enabling me to properly wield it for the benefit of development going forward, rather than simply giving in to its unwieldy nature.

One reason my notes have continued to expand while many sections go untouched for long periods is that it's not yet time to make a final decision about a given idea--many are possibilities, features to consider but not act on immediately when the idea first comes up. And in that light I do occasionally continue expanding on older notes with later inspirations or considerations. But this should only go on for so long. Eventually one has to say "enough, we're either doing this or not doing this."

With years of collective experience and an increasingly solidified development direction, it's much easier to go through my older notes to quickly and easily erase some ideas, or on the other hand embrace some of them!

I started with the bottom of the list, so the oldest notes, and just worked my way up from there, organizing the content into proper sections for future reference, while also deciding whether to remove notes permanently, condense or adjust them a bit, or if simple enough implement a feature immediately in the interest of just getting it off the damn list :P

Definitely the oldest notes at the bottom were the easiest to tackle. And there were some really old notes in there. Like a reference to a need to add some sort of high security response (which we have since escalated to high/max/steri, among other special responses xD).

Some notes indeed referenced features that have actually since been added, though were either thought up independently later on and/or it had been so long I forgot, couldn't find, or didn't bother looking for the relevant notes (which were probably relatively brief in such cases, i.e. not significant or important design reference material).

In reading all this I certainly came across a number of interesting older notes, like I didn't remember that Imps could come out of Ambush Traps prior to Alpha 15. I also apparently had notes on a "combat simulator" you would be able to hook up to in a place like Zion in order to test ideas, but now you'd just use Cog-Minder for that :P

In some cases I ended up fixing ancient super rare tiny bugs that were mentioned years ago but never again--so some folks are getting credit for a FIX after so long. This particular Engineer bug was funny, and although I had fixed it back then, I forgot to remove the reference from my notes so I got to see it again:

Results

Having completed this useful review, my TODO notes have been reduced from 454 pages to a mere 254 pages! The file size (it's just a .txt) is down from 900 KB to 520 KB, and word count dropped from 146k to 84k. Technically that includes 6k words related to notes for things I have decided will not be used, but I'm keeping in their own section for reference.

Importantly, these notes are now fully organized from beginning to end! As such I can also more easily see the full scope and potential within, including a wide range of substantial content such as multiple new maps and factions, though as usual I don't see all of that happening. Heck there's even a way to make "Player 2" canon in there.

Features!

In my eagerness to slim down my notes, throughout this process I preferred to either outright delete entries or immediately add/modify the feature they cover. So naturally we've got some new features out of this!

I haven't started Beta 15 proper and the changelog is already 40 entries strong... Some of this is QoL, and it's probably a good idea to get a lot of these little things out of the way first anyway, in order to have more to show for the release, since as usual most of the new content itself will be a secret! (spoilers)

Feast your eyes on some of the resurfaced cool ideas from many years ago...

The PSU Rigger also supporting timed detonations of rigged power sources is an example of an older idea I jotted down when later adding Sapper Charges, since those introduced the mechanic, so it could also be extended to the rigger with a bit of work. Parsed and added immediately.

Added a new option for autocommenting known Heavy locations (works for Behemoths, too).

And another option for showing the time to move to the end of your path when highlighting it (Ctrl-Alt):

Part comparisons can now be reversed! (via the button, or the 'r' key as highlighted):

Stasis Traps color and animate your HUD border as with Stasis Beams, although in a different color:

Machine locations are added to your intel if discovered via terrain scanning or other means, rather than just via hacking:

The evolution screen now has more forms of keyboard support--rather than just letters the slot type and amounts can be adjusted with arrows/numpad/hjkl:

That's like upgrading in RPGLIKE, and apparently I had partially coded that as an option for evolution as well but never completed it.

Mouse users will be able to cycle between item label categories using the mouse wheel, rather than requiring keyboard input:

I didn't want to add this originally because it could cause other issues, but after some corresponding adjustments it's worth seeing how this turns out.

The stuff I'm working on isn't all QoL. For example alert now decays gradually, instead of in large chunks at specific intervals. Chunks were easier to implement and work with at first, but it was time to refine this system to make it somewhat more natural and intuitive.

And there's always room for something that's just fun, like stats on your allies :)

Voting

Back to the original purpose, this process did enable me to flesh out the feature voting list with some nice new options.

We'll be doing that soonish, and although working on a patron-chosen feature will slow down Beta 15 somewhat (depending on what is chosen), I'm clearly already doing a good enough job of that on my own... Plus I know folks want to do some voting.

I've previously stated that I wanted to finish the UFD arc before getting back to voting (in order to get that done more quickly), but I've changed my mind on that, especially after seeing some of these juicy options...