[Freeciv-Dev] Re: freeciv 2.0 spec

[Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa <vasc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, Andrew Sutton wrote:

> never mind... apparently my ideas about development processes are just plain  
> crazy. its odd. some people have said we need this, and then others have 
> turned around and said that its bad.
> 
> maybe somebody can explain the prejudice against process - however light - 
> and validate their claims.

> if there's actually historic evidence, can somebody please point me to an 
> open source project that has failed utterly because the developers wanted to 
> take the time to think about the *next* version and write their ideas down? 
> there seems to be some concensus that having a requirement/design phase is so 
> bad that anything written that way isn't good (enough? raimar?)

There should always be design. However it shouldn't be monolithic. If you
are doing a new project using new tech and with new goals you can't afford
to etch anything in stone beforehand. That's why i like to use prototyping
for developing software.

> and for the record... no i'm not in college. i'm an actual software engineer 
> and i design software for a living (a slave to the process :) and my rants 
> aren't coming from idealistic innocence fresh from a college course, but hard 
> learned lessons in practical development. i've written code both ways and i 
> have to say that the best software i've ever written has gone a much longer 
> development process than what i've proposed. so please, enlighten me.

=== My main gripe with your idea follows:

   You are proposing a massive rewrite of a complex piece of software for
   what i consider to be aestethical reasons. Besides the
   generalized rulesets i basically see no advantage over what we have
   now.

   XConq is fully customizeable and look at how many freshmeat hits it has:
   Record hits: 893, URL hits: 862

   compared to Freeciv:
   Record hits: 7,098, URL hits: 11,395

   I have experience of this with muds. There are two families of MUDs
   (between others): DIKUmuds and LPMuds. LPMuds are completely scriptable
   because the MUD is programmed in a language called LPC. There are
   people that even programmed webservers in that language.
   DIKUmuds are mostly hardwired in C, with minimal scripting. Guess which
   one has most sucess? DIKUmud. Why? LPMuds tend to be boring and
   insipient because most of the effort is spent in generality instead of
   being spent into making a fun game for people to play.

   People just don't care about scripting. Its a bonus not a feature.

   Here is my freeciv TODO list:
     Fully functional Win32 client.
     Better isometric tileset.
     Make server settings settable from inside the client.
     Make the UI easier to use.
     Sound.
     Improved AI.
     Performance tweaks.
     Better scripting.
     Debugging.

   In parallel:
     Improve the metaserver.
     Create a better infrastructure for joining games.

---
Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa @ Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa