Re: [Freeciv-Dev] Fantasy Modpack

[David Pfitzner <dwp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mark Nettle wrote:

> I mentioned earlier that I was planning on making a Fantasy modpack. 
<snip>

Sounds cool!  

Though the effect that one can obtain tech from other players 
(by treaty, spying, invasion) could have some undesired effects 
regarding the scheme of having "different realms" of techs.

> * If you have two units with the PARTISAN flag, only the first works. I
> was going to suggest a call to best_role_unit() rather than get_role_unit()
> but that wouldn't quite match how partisans work.

Making it choose the best role_unit based on the global
tech knowledge would seem a reasonable generalisation
(and consistent with the existing requirement that Guerilla 
Warfare must be known by at least 1 player to get Partisans),
but the various other current requirements for when Partisans 
appear make me wonder how useful the generalisation would be 
even then.

> * Research Lab + Library gives +100% science without University, unlike
> Stock Market, which needs both Marketplace and Bank.

Agreed, inconsistent.  I guess Research Lab (including SETI)
should only work if you have a University + Library.

> * Can't specify a different helpdata.txt (but ~/.freeciv etc will fix that I
> guess)

Hmm, unfortunately rulesets and helptext do not work well at 
the moment, and ~/.freeciv by itself won't help very much. 
You could still only have one replacement helpdata.txt in 
~/.freeciv (eg, over-writing if someone were to install multiple 
modpacks), no convenient user-control over which helpdata.txt 
is used when, and any such replacement helpdata.txt installed 
for a modpack may over time diverge from the stock helpdata.txt 
in ways unrelated to the modpack.

Two possibilities would be:

1. Allow multiple helpdata.txt files, and merge the results
(so modpack helpfiles would only have to contain help data
specific for that modpack).  This requires clients to have the
right modpack and (maybe) correct command-line flags to get
the right help, but for drastic modpacks which have their 
own tiles this may be required anyway.

Actually, the command-line flags requirement could be 
avoided by having the server send the client the ruleset
tagnames, and the client use those to merge in the approriate 
help data if available.

2. Allow specifying help text in the ruleset files (eg, for
each defined unit, building etc) and send the text to the
clients with the ruleset data.  This way clients should 
always get the right help text for the current units etc.

> PS: I'm happily running OpenBSD 2.5 now.

Great.

Regards,
-- David