[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Compound City Names

[Stan Shebs <shebs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Erik Sigra wrote:
> 
> I have now looked at the Xconq screenshots at
> <http://sources.redhat.com/xconq/>. It is very impressive. Xconq has
> many of the features I want in Freeciv. It has isometric view, hexagon
> map, contour lines (they look BETTER than I imagined when you told me),
> very accurate world maps, many terrain types, ...

Thanks!

> (I noted that the rivers flow between the tiles instead of in the middle
> of them.)

This is defined by the Xconq game module.  For instance, panzer.g
has its streams going through the middle of cells, since for that game
they are pathways to sneak along, and not barriers to movement.

> It even has the Freeciv unit graphics. And a CivII emulation.

A fairly recent development...

> It seems like Freeciv and Xconq has a lot to learn from each other. You
> must have given it a lot of thought. What code and data do you think
> could be shared through libraries? (City name generation and network
> code are obvious.)

Off the top of my head, it seems hard to share much code in a literal
sense.  Xconq is about handling strategy games in general, at the cost
of the ability to exactly emulate any particular existing game, while
Freeciv is about doing a really good job at Civ-type games specifically.
This is reflected up and down through each code base, and if you try to
abstract it, you can end up spending more time on the abstraction
machinery than on doing the game itself.  But it's an interesting idea,
worth contemplating at least.

In any case, there are many opportunities to share content and algorithms.
Xconq's primitive Civ emulation includes a couple algorithms lifted from
Freeciv, and I also liked the Trident units, so I borrowed a copy of
those.  In turn, Freeciv has a random name list taken from Xconq.

> I think integration would boost development of both games (commercial
> game developers spend huge amounts of time playing competitor's games).
> Of course I will testplay Xconq now and even look at the sorce code.

As you can tell, I follow Freeciv development pretty closely.  Although
I don't have time to work on Freeciv code directly, I'm a big fan!

Stan
shebs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx