Version history
Every development report in the project vault, newest first. Each one records what changed, why, and what to look at in game.
The phases
Development runs to a plan of numbered phases. What each one added, and where the wiki covers it.
| Phase | Closed at | What it was |
|---|---|---|
| Phase 0 - foundations | 1.6.30 | Named RNG streams, a bonus-provider stat sheet, the chunked hero-file tail, a zone registry, a sprite scaler, dev tooling, and the balance telemetry CSV. Invisible in play; everything after it stands on these. |
| Phase 1 - the item endgame | 1.7.7 | Sockets, gems, runes, runewords and charms, ethereal drops, Magic and Gold Find, gambling at Wirt, and the crafting window. |
| Phase 2 - the character | 1.7.11+ | The respec at Adria, the run toggle, and the aura gameplay pass. |
| The 1.8 line | current | The loot mechanics rework listed below. |
The hero file's chunked tail is the last planned save-format growth: new state
appends a chunk rather than moving anything. That is why characters break less often now than they
did through the 1.5 and 1.6 lines.
The 1.8 line - loot mechanics
| Version | What landed |
|---|---|
| 1.8.0 | alvl, mlvl and ilvl introduced; spell tiers gain a level-1 band; books gated by their spell's band; all three levels made visible |
| 1.8.1 | Four base tiers - Normal, Nightmare, Hell, Torment - as a per-item property rather than 670 new rows |
| 1.8.2 | Banded quality levels and depth-weighted rare/unique/primal odds |
| 1.8.3 | The replay seam: banded pools for fresh generation, authored pools when rebuilding from a stored seed |
| 1.8.4 | First audit - guarded quality rolls, no area level in town, and a correction to what 1.8.0 claimed about shops |
| 1.8.5 | Vendors stock tiered gear on a chance that follows the difficulty |
| 1.8.6 | Second audit - the vendor price cap now declines a tier instead of risking an unbounded retry loop |
| 1.8.7 | Third audit - stale inventory-tab files rejected rather than misparsed |
| 1.8.8 | Sockets v2 - the socket ceiling is the item's inventory footprint (1 to 6), every base tier can host them, and jewelry sockets at magic and better |
| 1.8.9 | All 33 Diablo II runes, on one depth ladder; Hel cuts requirements, Zod makes the host indestructible |
| 1.8.10 | Reaudit - 28 of the 33 runes could never drop, and Ascend Runes could produce a charm |
| 1.8.11 | 370 runewords across the ten non-jewelry slots, 61 of them Diablo II's own with D2's recipes |
| 1.8.12 | Audit of the whole 1.8 line against the source; the quality band curves stopped being hand-copied |
| 1.8.13 | Wiki misinformation a numeral sweep could not see - jewelry missing from the gem host table, a self-contradicting sockets lede |
| 1.8.14 | The Pipeline page, rebuilt from source after a dozen "not started" backlog entries turned out to have shipped |
| 1.8.15 | Levski's Roar - the crafting monument, a 3x4 grid, and Free the Sockets: insertion stops being permanent |
| 1.8.16 | Reaudit - directive point 8 found half-done, and the crafting recipes stopped being hand-typed |
| 1.8.17 | Levski's Roar was unreachable: OBJ_STAND's selFlag is 0, so the monument ignored every click |
| 1.8.18 | The monument moves one tile north, off the path junction |
| 1.8.19 | Outline, no name, no click - the monument had a cursor but no hover text and no working operate |
| 1.8.20 - 1.8.25 | The Levski's Roar window, built and then repeatedly repaired: never drawn, then a wireframe over Tristram, then uncloseable, then falling off the screen. Space became the master closer along the way |
| 1.8.26 | The transmute grid learns item footprints, so a two-by-three sword no longer occupies one cell |
| 1.8.27 - 1.8.31 | The gold-hover bug. Four theories died - including three the test harness itself suggested - before the answer turned out to be the 960px window width |
| 1.8.32 | Gold reaches the bottom three inventory rows; the wiki's eleven hand-typed numbers were located and pinned to source |
| 1.8.33 | Torment stops being Hell with bigger numbers |
| 1.8.34 | Ninety-two cast cues - a sound per skill, at the moment of the cast |
| 1.8.35 | The resistance soft cap and per-difficulty penetration: past the cap, three points of gear buy one point of resistance |
| 1.8.36 | Runt and Giant ordinary monsters, derived from a hash rather than stored |
| 1.8.37 | Skill impact cues, carried on the missile from the cast to the first hit |
| 1.8.38 | MPQ Unit B - the three-state icon strips |
| 1.8.39 | Reaudit of 1.8.17 through 1.8.38 |
| 1.8.40 - 1.8.42 | The bottom HUD plate, three times: v3, then darkened, then v2 with no colour treatment at all at the user's instruction |
| 1.8.43 - 1.8.45 | The burger menu and portal icons - removed, recut at 26x26, then given a click blink and a 1px nudge |
| 1.8.46 - 1.8.48 | The dark limestone backdrop, from the character sheet to all six side panels |
| 1.8.49 - 1.8.50 | The class silhouette loses its gold tint and drops to 55% luminance |
| 1.8.51 - 1.8.53 | Inventory polish: gold digits flush with tab 10, SORT flush with tab 1, and the Abilities arrows brightened back against the new darker ground |
| 1.8.54 - 1.8.56 | Debug spawners for the new item families - runes, gems, charms, a fresh base with N sockets, and ethereal on demand |
| 1.8.57 - 1.8.60 | The runeword book on W: five columns, rune and slot filters, and a Possible-RW toggle that lights the runes you hold. Shipped, then found drawing from a gated block, then rebuilt for overlap |
| 1.8.61 - 1.8.63 | Two town objects. The chest was rebuilt and turned out to be a file nothing read; Levski's Roar got real art and then halved |
| 1.8.64 | Reaudit - the monument is solid again, which in this engine is really its activation range |
| 1.8.65 | The object-instance test harness - 14 tests that build town and assert placement, selectability and operate routing on real placed objects |
| 1.8.66 | The burger menu's map icon opens the runeword book instead of the automap, which keeps TAB |
| 1.8.67 | Loose runes and gems say what they do in each host - and eleven Sockets v2 channels that had never been formatted at all, including runes whose only effect in a host is a flag. Socketed drops carry a red socket count on the ground label |
| 1.8.68 | The first runeword: its own bonuses printed at last, the gold name moved to the title, socket and runeword backings, and a hover overlay showing the stones and the empty sockets over the sprite |
All reports
The full text of each lives in Diablo Orcl/02-Development-Reports/.