I spent some time (admittedly, not much) last night looking at the HA! code. Starting to feel that itch again. It's been neglected too long. Reviewed and responded to some of the comments I received at CodePlex (most were helpful, others were "misguided" and needed some explaining on my part.)
Took a look at the Dungeon Generation code yet again. Man I hate how kludgy that stuff is. I just don't have the time or motivation (mostly the time) to rewrite something that works well 95% of the time. As I spot generation errors, I do try to patch the code to fix them, but rewriting it from scratch isn't likely to happen any time soon.
Also looked at the code in the Gender/Race/Class selection menus. There's a bug there, pointed out to me via a nicely detailed bug ticket on my Codeplex site. I've been thinking about redoing that whole section any way... so that will be the first thing I hit. Maybe tonight, after dinner. Is there anything good on TV wednesday nights anymore?
One of the good things about travelling so much is that you find time in the evenings for stuff you usually can't justify.
Occasionally, someone asks me if I'll be porting HA! to use XNA. I really can't imagine ever doing that. I already catch hell on the roguelike newsgroups because HA! has about 100k of code and a 20+ meg framework. Adding yet another download and consuming more drive space doesn't seem the way to go (IN THIS CASE.)
Don't misunderstand, I love XNA and TorqueX, but who the hell wants to see an ASCII console app written with XNA? My intent is to take what I've learned from making HA! (and I've learned plenty) and apply it to the next game I make (which will be with XNA and TorqueX), but leave the old code in the past. Sounds good to me.
Keep the knowledge, not the code.
and no, that doesn't mean I'm abandoning HA!