I'm interested in trying to get some of the half-finished prestige classes working, and possibly adding new room types / map areas if I can figure out the code enough to do that (/ find the time).
The prestige classes work seems straightforward enough - I think the additional code for most of the abilities should be similar to existing prestige classes / monster abilities, so it should be mostly copying & adjusting existing code into prestige.irh in /lib/ & un-commenting the options out.
The map stuff seems trickier - the room types along with terrain features are in dungeon.irh in /lib/ (and there seems to be commented out code for a "Hellish rift" leading to an incomplete 9 hells sub-dungeon), and the Goblin Caves are specifically mentioned as being the over-arching dungeon, but I can't see where the code to control which rooms it contains on which levels is, apart from the bit at the top which adds the specific one-off dungeon features. So adding new room types seems like it'd be straightforward, but I'm not sure how you'd guarantee they actually make it into the game.
But adding new *shapes* of rooms would require more additions - at the moment they're all based on a set number of categories - e.g. mazes, surreal mazes, hedge mazes are all "RM_MAZE" types just with differing encounter lists / terrain. No idea where "RM_MAZE" is defined though, which I think would be where adding whole new shapes of rooms would need to be done (Or, really, if it needs to be. If people want to add towns etc. I think it'd be easier just to draw a specific map like the Goblin Encampment. So the room shape thing is probably not worth worrying about on reflection - think we've got enough generic types to work with, along with the ability to draw specific rooms if we want)
Adding a plain overland/outdoors room at the start with the Goblin dungeons just below would be the first step to getting additional separate dungeons added I think, but I also think that might break the specific "leaving the Goblin Dungeons" code / the code that stops you resting outside the dungeons once you hit a certain level. (And I have no idea where the code that puts the player in the Goblin Caves dungeon specifically at the start of the game is, or if that could easily be adapted to drop the player in "The World" dungeon first, with the Goblin caves as just a sub-dungeon)
More simply, from looking at the subraces.irh in /lib/, it seems like just removing the "if 0" / "endif" at the start / end might enable subraces? (plus toggling the selection in the options) Could be worth changing that in a test version and seeing what happens - I assume it was disabled by Journeyman so a reason, but possibly just for balance or because the sub-races weren't fleshed out rather than being game-breaking.
Essentially, I think if we can figure out how to add new dungeons / rooms, get an overland map with distinct towns / dungeons / forests etc working, and add quests / guilds in somehow, we'd be getting close to the original vision of the game. But I think a lot of that would be adding new code rather than just adapting what's there already, and I think is far beyond my abilities.
In case anyone hasn't seen it, the original technical white paper for the game that goes into some of the underlying coding philosophy / aims is at:
http://www.incursion-roguelike.org/TechPaper%20%28Web%20Version%29.htmThere's also some comments from Journeyman from the old Google groups that mentioned aims for the overland / guilds / gods / quests etc - don't have time to dig them out now, but will see if I can find them at a later date for reference.
Realize I've rambled a bit here & this isn't the most coherent / structured set of comments (wrote much more than I intended to), but thought I'd add it in case anyone found it useful (/ as a reminder to myself later) - if anyone's had a look through the code and thinks I've got something wrong / knows the answers to some of those questions please let us know!
(And also many many thanks to chooseusername for the bugfixes & getting the code onto bitbucket!)