[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Patch: Run for your lives! The disasters are coming!

[Jeff Mallatt <jjm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 2000/02/22 01:52 , Mike Jing wrote:
>All right.  Here is the disasters patch everyone has been waiting for 
>(NOT!).  It introduces a new disasters ruleset, a new server variable 
>"disasterrate" and help text to go with it.  Please test it and report any 
>bugs you find.

Just when you thought you had figured out how to survive Barbarians, now
come the Disasters...  ;-)

I did find a few, minor problems, and have a couple of suggestions:

- Since you changed the protocol, you should add a capability string.  See
comments in common/capstr.c.  It's best if you can implement a
non-mandatory capability (using has_capability() calls in the code), but
this is not always feasible.

- Running at log level 2, load_ruleset_disasters() reports "Didn't match
improvement "None" for Earthquake.".  Since "None" is perfectly valid, it
shouldn't produce a warning.

- Since you use distinct notify_player_ex() calls to report the cause and
each effect of a disaster, the player will get multiple popups (if he has
popup selected as a message option for disaster events) -- I think it would
be nice to receive only one popup for a given disaster that explains the
cause and all of the effects.  This means, simply build the entire response
string, then call notify_player_ex() once.

- Perhaps simplify the "disasters" option to be just tenths of a percent
chance for a disaster per city per turn, with a range of 0 to 100.  This
would yield both a finer control resolution and a broader range.

- If you added a "special_req" field, you wouldn't need to implement the
"Civ2 River Kluge".  Just like tech_neg and improve_neg are OR'd together
to determine whether a disaster is negated, terrain_req and special_req
would be OR'd together to determine whether a disaster may happen.  So,
specifying "River" for both would handle both the Civ1 and Civ2 river cases
cleanly -- and it extends the overall capability of the disasters ruleset.

>Other clients 
>will be updated a little bit later.

That will be great!

>And could someone please send in the list of disasters in Civ2?  Thanks in 
>advance.

Hum.  I can't find mention of disasters anywhere in the Civ2 documentation
or files.  Sorry I couldn't help.

jjm