[bombermaze-dev] new developer, powerup changes, and roadmap

[Sydney Andrew Tang]

I'd like to announce that Chris Emery has joined as a developer on the
bombermaze CVS.

He has added a new slowdown PowerUp which uses the previously unused sixth
frame of powerup.png. All existing themes will continue to work correctly
using the new code, although the slowdown powerup will appear as a blank
icon until the existing themes have been updated.

Up to now, the plan was to have me finish my rewrite of the theme
backend so that I could finish implementing the Theme Preview feature in
the Preferences dialog. This would become 0.6.7.

After that, we would begin the migration to Gnome2/Gtk2 and 0.7.0 would
be the end result of that migration. There would be no new features
codewise between 0.6.7 and 0.7.0; the only code changes would be those
required for bombermaze to compile using Gnome2 libraries. Nicholas has
already rewritten the documentation.

With the new PowerUp code, a slight a revision of this plan is in order.
0.6.7 will instead consist of the current 0.6.6 code in CVS with the
SlowDown PowerUp changes in place. The new theme backend and Theme
Previewing will either be in 0.6.7 or 0.6.8. As before, 0.7.0 will be the
first Gnome2 package, and will include the new documentation.

Chris has asked about the possibility of adding other new PowerUps. As
they would require adding new "frames" to powerup.png, I believe that we
should reserve any further themes for the 0.7.x series. I propose that
starting in 0.7.0, the powerup.png file should contain at least 4 blank
frames to allow for expansion. Possible candidates for additional
PowerUps/Diseases would be: Punch Bomb, Autodrop Bomb, and Reverse Control 
Directions.

As an aside, I will be on vacation beginning next week, so maybe I will
actually be able to get some work done on bombermaze...

Sydney