Documentation polishing.

[open-adventure.git] / notes.adoc

diff --git a/notes.adoc b/notes.adoc
index 5cf74304e582355d21ac03c9e3131bf586a4aa61..6fac22c072fe80d4eca52fed861a721c765e692b 100644 (file)
--- a/notes.adoc
+++ b/notes.adoc
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ The principal maintainers of this code are Eric S. Raymond and Jason
 Ninneman.  Eric received Don Woods's encouragement to update and ship
 the game; Jason signed on early in the process to help. The assistance
 of Peje Nilsson in restructuring some particularly grotty gotos is
-gratefully acknowledged. Petr Voropaev contributed fuzz testing. Aaaron
+gratefully acknowledged. Petr Voropaev contributed fuzz testing. Aaron
 Traas did a lot of painstaking work to improve test coverage.
 
 == Nomenclature ==
@@ -29,15 +29,16 @@ with the BSD Games version.
 == Philosophy ==
 
 Extreme care has been taken not to make changes that would alter the
-logic of the game as we received it from Don Woods.  By policy, all
-user-visible changes must be revertible with the -o (oldstyle) option.
+logic of the game as we received it from Don Woods, except to fix
+glitches that were clearly bugs.  By policy, all user-visible
+changes must be revertible with the -o (oldstyle) option.
 
-It is a goal of this project to exactly preserve the *behavior* of
-430-point Adventure, but the implementation of it is fair game for
-improvement. In particular, we are concerned to move it to a form that
-is (a) readable, and (b) friendly to forward translation to future
-languages.  It has already survived a move from FORTRAN to C; a future
-as a Python or Go translation seems possible, even probable.
+It is a goal of this project to exactly preserve the *intended
+behavior* of 430-point Adventure, but the implementation of it is fair
+game for improvement. In particular, we are concerned to move it to a
+form that is (a) readable, and (b) friendly to forward translation to
+future languages.  It has already survived a move from FORTRAN to C; a
+future as a Python or Go translation seems possible, even probable.
 
 == Functional changes ==
 
@@ -90,9 +91,14 @@ with coverage tools (we now have over 95% coverage, with the remaining
 confined to exception cases that are very difficult to reach). This is
 what you are running when you do "make check".
 
-In the process we found and fixed a few minor bugs. Most notably, reading
-the relocated Witt's End sign in the endgame didn't work. Behavior when
-saying the giant's magic words outside his room wasn't quite right either.
+In the process we found and fixed a few minor bugs:
+
+* Reading the relocated Witt's End sign in the endgame didn't work.
+
+* Behavior when saying the giant's magic words outside his room wasn't
+  quite right - the game responded as though the player were in the room.
+ 
+* Attempting to extinguish an unlit urn caused it to lose its oil.
 
 The move to modern C entailed some structural changes.  The most
 important was the refactoring of over 350 gotos into if/loop/break
@@ -137,7 +143,7 @@ ways:
   to fix it because doing so would (a) be quite difficult, and (b)
   compromise forward-portability to other languages.
 
-* Muxh of the code still assumes one-origin array indexing.  Thus,
+* Much of the code still assumes one-origin array indexing.  Thus,
   arrays are a cell larger than they strictly need to be and cell 0 is
   unused.
 
@@ -145,4 +151,10 @@ ways:
   like a FORTRAN or BCPL program.  Some (incomplete) effort has been made
   to introduce semantic types.
 
+We have made exactly one minor architectural change.  In addition to the
+old code's per-object state-description messages, we now have a per-object
+message series for state *changes*.  This makes it possible to pull a fair
+amount of text out of the arbitrary-messages list and associate those
+mesages with the objects that conceptually own them.
+
 // end