Re: [Freeciv-Dev] City styles - proposal.

[David Pfitzner <dwp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jerzy Klek wrote:

> I have been thinking about one civ2 feature for some time:
> the city picture were different for different city sizes
> and also architecture styles like antic, far-east and so on.

I like the idea; a few comments:

- "antic" seems a strange term to me, though I guess its related
  to "antique"/"antiquity".  "Ancient" seems more natural.
- How about a separate tilespec prefix, eg "cities.*" instead 
  of generic "tx.*"
- Similarly, probably put new graphics in cities.xpm/cities.spec

> styles = "industrial", "modern", "european", "antic"

Don't think this is really necessary; the server can just look 
for all sections matching "city_*" (or maybe "cities_*") ?

> ; There are 3 city sizes: small, medium and large

I was thinking this restriction could be made variable, and
then I thought that it could be nice for the _client_ to 
determine how much detail it wants to show the different 
sized cities in (eg, based on tilesets).

So, there would be some "style" string worked out based on 
national preference and known techs (now sure how this 
should work exactly; should the techs be nation-dependent?)  
With some means of fallbacks so can add new national 
preferences and old clients use standard "default" graphics.

Then the client would use the style string and the city size 
to decide what to display, based on info in cities.spec;
eg, spec file could have tags "cities.foo_0", "cities.foo_4", 
"cities.foo_7", "cities.foo_wall", meaning style "foo", 
with different graphics for size 0+, 4+, 7+.

(OTOH this much generality could get more complicated to 
implement, and maybe isn't really necessary.)

-- David