ZC [2.future] Development Plans [To-Do]

[Saffith]

Similarly hard-coded enemies can be replaced with scripted enemies, same thing with items, etc.

I'm just not sure that's feasible for everything. For sprite types, for instance, if we want to replace the fixed-point coordinates with floating-point, the current script engine won't work with that at all.
I don't know. It probably doesn't make sense to worry about it too much at this point, anyway.

There's no reason that 2.x has to die for this to work, and there's no reason to abandon the community using 2.x to allow a rewrite.

I don't disagree with any of that. I would like there to be a 2.60 (or 2.55, or whatever), and I'd like to start the branch as soon as 2.50.3 is complete. I'm already leaning toward abandoning the current rewriting effort and doing it more gradually, starting there. But the current codebase is so messy and so fragile that we're greatly limited in what we can actually do in the way of incremental upgrades without breaking a lot of existing quests, and what I absolutely do not want to do is make it worse by adding unmaintainable features and exposing more internal behavior.

and insofar as deprecating ZScript, the community opinion has been unfavourable to this outcome.

Who? Where? You keep saying that, but I haven't seen any evidence of it. There've been some questions and some uncertainty, but I haven't seen any real opposition to it from anyone except you.

We do however, have people willing to work on 2.55, and 2.60.

That's great, but we need more than willingness. Several people were willing to work on 2.50, and now it's an unmaintainable mess of spaghetti code.

So when updating a quest from 2.5 to whatever version adds AngelScript, would there be a way to remove certain ZScript scripts that are broken? Or are they so incompatible that all scripts would be removed from the file? I'm fine with ZScript support being dropped, but I'm wondering how hard it will be (if it's even possible) to update a 2.5 quest over to the next version.

We just can't say at this point. I think updating a quest would mean removing all ZScripts and updating enemies, items, etc. to the new versions, but maybe not.