Re: [Freeciv-Dev] Suggestion: FreeCiv on a Hex!

[Artur Biesiadowski <abies@xxxxxxxxx>]

Lalo Martins wrote:

> There are people who want squares, people who want isometric
> Civ-like diamonds, and now people who want hexes (and as an
> old-time RPG player I can see how the game could benefit from
> that). Perhaps we should add as a goal for, say, 2.1, to get rid
> of all code that depends on the square-ness of tiles? So the
> shape of tiles would be a matter of choosing a ruleset and
> tileset? Ok, I know that's a tough proposition, but sounds
> feasible and I can see people wanting to implement it.


I don't suppose that it is possible to reasonably support all variations
from single codebase. We could for example move all shape dependent
routines to library and load dynamically depending on choosen ruleset,
but it would be 3x times more work. 

I will risk statement that nobody will prefer diamond tiles over hexes
(anybody?:). Diamond tiles might be better than plain squares, but are
pale in comparison with hexes. So I think that there are not three
choices, but two - stay with squres (easy, no work, similar to
civ/civ2), or go for hexes in some future version.

Supporting both options would be very hard - and would have to be done
by ifdefing I'm afraid. I do not see real possibility of doing it
dynamically in C (maybe C++ with virtual classes...).

More I think about it, more I would like to have hex based game. I think
that we can start to discuss some implementation details - talk is
cheap. If at some point mantainers will give green light to Big Change,
coders will have some things already solved/voted.

Artur