Pre-release mayhem has begun

Kris has kept me hopping with fixes and enhancements to the new quest dungeons, enhancements related to chest and door traps, chasms, and some new monster types. Hopefully the stream will diminish soon, I can catch up, and then start a fresh game with the goal of making it through before the release date.

At the last minute I decided to pull diagonal movement. Too many maps have been built that assume straight north-south-east-west movement. We have some ideas to put it back for the next release with some changes to accomodate the older maps; I just didn't think we had time to settle on something for this release.

I'm already thinking about the next release, and can't wait to get started. I think I'll devote the first month to code maintenance, there are some hairy spots that could use some cleaning up. Then maybe a few weeks on really interesting or feature suggestions (loot drops for sure, probably diag movement).

Then comes the interesting part. I want to devote the entire release effort to automatic dungeon generation. In fact, depending on how it goes, I want to push on automatic "interesting" NPC generation. If we can get something decent there then I think town generation will fall right out, and world generation should not be too hard. But that's a big "if". I have yet to meet an automatically-generated scripted NPC that was at all interesting. I'd rather have a few really interesting NPC's (like Ultima 5-7) then thousands of boring ones (like the early Elder Scrolls efforts, which were so dull I haven't bothered with their later ones).