[Freeciv-Dev] Miscellaneous comments (or the night of the small patches)

[Juho Snellman <jsnell@xxxxxx>]

These comments/patches are based on April 5th CVS. 

Disclaimer. I haven't followed freeciv-dev very actively for the last
two months. If any of my ideas have been shot down already, please
ignore them silently :-) 

Server prompt
-------------

Changing the longer option names is very tiresome (researchspeed...
urgh). I think that a
feature allowing use of abbreviated names would make experimenting
with the options much more pleasant. Luckily, adding that capability
is trivial, thence one of the included patches :-)

The patch also adds a notification of the change to the server
console, since I'll readily admit that abbreviations could cause 
a typo to change the wrong option, and without any feedback that
would never be noticed.

Tiles
-----

The new units are excellent. At least on first impression, the terrain
tiles are not really distinguished enough. And the mountains are 
just plain ugly. I don't think that this will be a long term problem,
but at least currently the middle button is getting a lot of use.

After playing about half a game with the new tiles, I can't 
see myself going back to playing with the old ones though :)

Adjusting workers from the map
------------------------------

This is a lovely feature. The semantics of the 't'-key seem a bit silly,
though. It cycles through the different colours for the shaded area, but as 
far as I can see there is no way of removing the area. Well, beyond
forcing a redraw of the map. 

Is making the shaded areas persistent through redraws infeasible? 
I think that they'd be much more useful in planning if each silly
change wouldn't clear all of them away (or worse, just parts of
them, leaving them into an inconsistent state). 

Bugs
----

Bounds checking in handle_stdin_input() wasn't quite militant
enough, causing stack-clobbering segfaults with too long 
commands (parameters were immune, though). Patch included.

Upgrading unit production seems strange. I researched Gunpowder,
started building warriors, and then researched Fundamentalism.
Leonardo's upgraded the warriors straight into musketeers, but
the production of warriors in cities was changed into pikemen.
The production of pikemen was changed to musketeers on the
following turn. Patch included.

To be honest, I think it is silly to the extreme, that if you have 
unit A obsoleted by unit B obsoleted by unit C, A is not obsoleted 
by C too. Is this how Civ II does it? 

Sometimes a (sentried) landunit are made the visible unit of a
stack containing a ship that is supposed to be transporting it.
I mostly noticed this when loading saved games, and the problem
always went away when the ship of the stack became the active unit.
But still, it is annoying to look at sentried chariots in the 
middle of the ocean. 

-- 
Juho Snellman
"C:stä on kehitetty Massachusettsin teknillisessä korkeakoulussa kieli
 nimeltä BCPL."

fc-obsolete_production.patch
Description: Patch fixing the upgrading of production when units become obsolete

fc-option-abbrev.patch
Description: Patch allowing the use of abbreviated option names in the server prompt

fc-overflow.patch
Description: Patch fixing a buffer overflow for too long server commands