Re: [Freeciv-Dev] terrain ruleset implementation

[David Pfitzner <dwp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Peter Schaefer wrote:

> David Pfitzner wrote:

> > Since this patch breaks old tiles.xpm, I wonder if this would
> > be a good time to split tiles.xpm into terrain.xpm and
> > special.xpm? 

> Ugh.. For the tiles - aren't the rulesets smart enough yet to allow
> giving a file name or tile type identifier in addition to 
> the tile ? So that both types of tiles maybe read ?

The point here is that the terrain.ruleset patch effectively
_requires_ a new tiles.xpm, for the new rivers and specials. [1]
So trying to support backward compatability to old tiles is
not only complicated, but does not get you very far.  I'm 
suggesting we use this compatibility break to re-structure
tiles.xpm without having to add cruft to support old tilesets.

[1] Well, _may_ require, depending on the ruleset used for the 
current game.  But the client has to load the tiles before
it ever connects to the server or knows what the ruleset is.
Connecting to the server and starting the game and _then_ 
finding out your client doesn't have the right tiles would 
not be good.  

Now maybe that compatibility break could better be used to move 
to a more flexible system.  (Though its hard to see how to 
future-proof against the above problem of effectively requiring
additional graphics to work properly.)  When the --tiles option
was first implemented, it was proposed to have a ruleset-like 
'spec' file for each tileset, telling the filenames, tile 
geometries, etc.  But that hasn't been implemented so far.  
And its still complicated how to coordinate with the 
units/terrain.ruleset to specify which graphic is used for 
a given unit/terrain.

Regards,
-- David