A new book update

I just finished the most recent changes, and so I pushed a new book update. There are some slight corrections, clarifications, but also conceptual change, and complete activations overhaul. I was comparing activation and divergence, and especially for a Wave, their differences; and it made me thinking: "why activated Wave can move over only one type of field, while diverged Wave can choose any?", "how is this fair?", ... So, I decided to level the playing fields, so to speak, and make all activator's steps, fields accessible to activated Wave.

Now, Wave does not inherit type of field at which it has been activated anymore, and instead it can choose from any of steps its activator can at the beginning of a ply. For the most part, activation works just like it was before, changes are relevant only for activators which have separated step- and capture-fields, like Pawn, and Shaman. For those two, Wave can now choose any movement or capturing step as its initial direction.

I was a little bit concerned about Wave activated by Shaman being OP. But, it's just one new activator, which is still more restricted than the other one OP already present in the game; namely, Centaur. So, in a way, it's more fair, since Centaur is now less of an outlier.

At the moment, I don't have any planned, or outstanding changes for the book; so, I'll say, it's as good as it gets. Of course, it's quite possible that I missed something, that should be corrected. With so many moving parts it's difficult to stay on top of every new version. In any case, if you notice something that looks like discrepancy between various texts, tables, examples, ...; please, do let me know.

I'll take this time between the book and the code, to take some more side-questing, and invest at least a few days to get to know NeoVim better. While I don't like vi, nor any derivatives, and have never been a fan, there is no denying that Pulsar is getting more and more annoying, the more I use it. I'm not sure what Pulsar devs are using, but I'm kinda appalled by the lack of performance on older, although still middle-of-the-road CPU, with plenty of memory. I also tried disabling tree-sitter, heck, even all of auto-complete stack, restarting Pulsar without plugins; all to no avail. I mean, everything works ok if edited file is well under 1k SLOC, otherwise it's a lot of pain. In a 4k SLOC Python file, every edit takes at least a second (!) before editor shows the change. As it is right now, this is not a proper tool for work, it's a toy. Bright, shiny, fairly extensible, beautiful; yet, ultimately, next to useless. Which is a shame, really; I do like it a lot.

Geany, you ask? Well, I did use it, it was good, I kinda liked it; but, after Pulsar, it's like going back to your first bike. Sure, it works, it can make you go places, but it's not the same anymore. For me, it's plan B, if NeoVim does not work for me. Especially since with the newest Geany version (2.0.0) very little has been changed compared to previous stable version, except devs bumped version number, and introduced C++17 dependency. So, it's painful to get the upgrade if your Linux repo is LTS, and it's simply not worth it. All together paint a bleak picture for future development of the IDE.

Anyway, the book can be found in usual places, it was compiled on November 14, 2024, and the version is 20241114.064539.