[Freeciv-Dev] Re: [Freeciv] Re: Nations + Feeling

[Raimar Falke <hawk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 03:55:47PM -0500, Jason Dorje Short wrote:
> Raimar Falke wrote:
> > 
> > On Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 10:50:33AM +0100, Vegh Karoly wrote:
> 
> > > Another question: What do i need to get a new country into FreeCIV? My
> > > wife is austrian, i'm hungarian, and she's quite offended that Hungary can
> > > be found in CIV, but Austria not. How to fix this? Shall i send u couple
> > > of Austrian city names, and ideas what they should have at startup?
> > 
> > The amount of nations is currently limited. So no more nations are
> > added to the CVS version. You may want to look at
> > <ftp://ftp.freeciv.org/freeciv/contrib/nations>. I hope that the
> > current limitation of freeciv in this area is removed in the next
> > major version.
> 
> At a glance, it looks like this will be a significant undertaking, and
> likely to break server-client compatibility completely.  (Obviously
> others know more about this issue than I, but no doubt most people know
> little about it, so here goes...)

Yes. See <http://arch.freeciv.org/freeciv-dev-200108/msg01622.html>.

> The number of nations is hard-coded in as MAX_NUM_NATIONS, which is 63. 
> It would be easy enough to change this value [1], but it's used in both
> server and client - so if they don't match then things won't work.  The
> easiest solution, then, might be to just increase this value the next
> time compatibility is broken.
> 
> The problem doesn't end there, though.  The nation is stored (and save
> in savegames, and transferred server-client) as an index into the list
> of nations (at least, so the ruleset claims).  This means any change to
> the list of nations will seemingly make all saved games incompatible. 
> The obvious solution here is to store the nation as a string in the
> savegame - but this too will violate savegame compatibility.  

> (I have some trouble believing this is true.  Is it true that every
> time a nation has been added in the past, savegame compatibility has
> been broken?)

I think that adding isn't a problem. So there were no problems. And we
don't plan to remove nations.

> Ideally, the client would be able to accept any number of nations.  This
> probably wouldn't be to hard to fix, but again would break compatibility
> of the server-client protocol.

The patch from above allows 64k nations.

> A much smaller issue is with having an overwhelming number of nations. 
> Someone suggested giving each nation a category, which could be used by
> the GUI code to group them and avoid having a single huge list.  IMO
> this is a separate issue and can be dealt with later.  Someone else said
> 63 nations ought to be enough.  My only response to that is to say that
> everyone who plays FreeCiv will want to have their nation represented,
> and there are a lot more than 63 nations in the world.

I agree that an extra type field for each nation would be nice. This
may also allow to have different nations for different times. For
example a English nation which includes colonies like Bombay and a
English nation which shows the current dimensions.

        Raimar

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