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

[David Pfitzner <dwp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(This is a followup to multiple messages in this thread.)

Jerzy Klek wrote:

> > Then the client would use the style string and the city size 
> > to decide what to display, based on info in cities.spec;

> T think and didn't understand what you meant the first time
> - the city look is very much client side stuff and graphic
> strings shouldn't appear in the ruleset file. So I might
> well end up with the following in misc.ruleset and nothing more:
> 
> [city]
> 
> industrial = "Industrialization"
> modern = "Automobile"
> 
> styles = "industrial", "modern", "european", "ancient"
> 
> the rest is up to client. 

Yes, that is what I meant! :-)

> The styles name are needed
> to verify the default style in nations.ruleset, and
> for me to implement general this scheme. 
> To be completely strict, one should be able to do without
> any server side ruleset, but...

I think the server side ruleset is still warranted, since
its the appropriate place to vary the industrial/modern
techs, and as you say regarding nation-dependent styles.

> > - Similarly, probably put new graphics in cities.xpm/cities.spec
>
> It's probably a good idea, but if so, a really clean solution
> would be to move all city related tiles to this file, like
> city size tile, disorder and so on. But this can be done at a
> later stage I hope.

Yep.  Due to tilespec flexibility that change can be made
almost anytime, without disruption.

> I don't think techs used to decide if siplay industrial or
> modern style should be nation dependent - real world experience
> is I think that industrialization cuses industrial look
> and something like automobile causes modern look. It's then also
> useful when you explore and find a new civilization, then just
> by their city look you can say something about their technology.

This is true for "close" civ variants, but potentially might
not be the case in more extreme variants, eg, ancients, fantasy,
futuristic.  OTOH I we don't have to support everything all 
at once :-)


> True, I forgot about that one. I will be somewhat difficult
> to have only one "occupied" tile because city tiles have
> different sizes, maybe I need to use something else intead of
> a small flag. No idea however yet.

Maybe do this similarly to walls?  Each style gets to define
its own "occupied" tile.  (Still imposes some contraints, but
similar to wall, and having separate images for all combinations
of style/size/wall/occupied is not going to be practical! :-)

-- David