Talk:Defunct features

Deferred features vs. Defunct features

OK, so what's the relationship between this article and the deferred features article? I think the latter one needs rewriting. Maybe it should be moved to unimplemented features. Also, currently the elf quest monsters here link to there, which isn't very useful. --ZeroOne 06:40, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

OK, never mind, I did that myself. :) --ZeroOne 06:45, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

IMO, the two articles should be defunct features and deferred features. Defunct features would remain unchanged; it's for features in previous versions of the game, but not the current one. Deferred features are those that have been announced (Pat Rankin's #tip) or are present in the source code but commented out or inaccessible (vorpal jabberwocky, burial). "Unimplemented" makes it sound like the features have never been coded, which would be inaccurate for everything we list. Tangentially: ideally the defunct/deferred features would all have their own articles, so for example we could see the Goblin King's stats before he was removed, and maybe even some strategy detailing how to beat him. --Eidolos 06:52, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

No, I do not think it sounds like that. See the opening sentence of the article, I didn't even change it: "The NetHack source contains code for several currently unimplemented features." I think it is perfectly unambiguous. But of course you are right that ideally we would have an article about Goblin King and all other defunct features. That still doesn't remove the need for nice summary pages, defunct features and deferred features. --ZeroOne 06:59, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, I still think it should be deferred/defunct. Unimplemented has two meanings: not coded and not enabled (and I almost always use it in the former sense). Deferred really means just not enabled. Plus if we use deferred we get a nice symmetry with deferred and defunct. I don't really care either way, as long as there's a clean separation between future features and past features. And I'm not arguing against summary pages at all; I was just saying that I don't like how Goblin King redirects to a summary page. :) --Eidolos 07:07, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

My use of the word "unimplemented" was perhaps sloppy. I'm not a coder! :-) I would keep the page at "Deferred features" because that's the word the source code uses (do a grep DEFERRED *.c). --Jayt 10:50, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

OK, I moved it back to "deferred features". :) --ZeroOne 11:38, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Elf quest characters

The elf quest characters were previously redirects to deferred features. I made them redirect here and delinked them from this page. If anyone wants to create proper articles for them, they are most welcome to do so. Just change the redirect into an article and add the link back. --ZeroOne 06:53, 20 August 2006 (UTC)