Re: [Freeciv-Dev] capability and ruleset.

["Bobby D. Bryant" <bdbryant@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nicolas Brunel wrote:

>     there is a very active developpment around modpacks these days ! :)
> It looks like with Sune patches ruleset will have to be changed.
> As it takes a long time for freeciv to spread all over the world, the best
> is to keep version compatible for as long as possible.
>
>    The idea is to count the number of new fields which have been modified.
> If there is none, the server will display the capability string with
> unit_upkeep and only send the info the client can accept. If there is
> more than zero, the server will display the capability string +unit_keep
>  and won't accept any client with the 'old' ruleset. There is also
> a capacity string in the ruleset. Maybe it's time to use it.

Actually, there seems to be only 2-3 modpacks in the works right now, and
they are helping *drive* these changes rather than suffering from them, so I
would suggest we not get caught up an a morass of backward-compatibility
issues just yet.  Let's pursue a vision of what we would like to support in
the rulesets, and try to get that vision coded and released as soon as
possible (i.e., before many more modpacks have been written, and before more
AI code based on the hard-coded values is written).

Then, after we've got the rulesets approximately how we want them, we can
expect only minor changes for the short and medium terms, and the
backward-compatibility issues will take less code to implement.

I, and presumably the other guys requesting these changes, would be happy to
upgrade my modpack to incorporate these new features sometime this summer,
but if we postpone things for a year or so I may be off doing other things,
and the design wouldn't be fresh on my mind even if I were free to do a major
revision then.  Better to make the ruleset changes now than later.

Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas