[Freeciv-Dev] Re: freeciv 1.12.1 spec?

[Andrew Sutton <ansutton@xxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 05 December 2001 03:10 pm, Jason Short wrote:
> I guess I'm thinking back to the way PayCivs did it - this was, IMO,
> pretty good.  When in "tutorial mode", there would be hooks for specific
> events client-side.  When that event happened, a popup window would give
> you tutorial information, and then the hook for that event would be
> removed (so that it was not given again).

i didn't realize that the other games separated client/server. hmm... that 
sounds fair enough.

later games (not just civs - i'm really thinking about RTS games and Age of 
Wonders) have built the trigger system into the game itself and tuturials 
were just built ontop of the trigger system.

> In theory it'd be good to have this text be common to all civ GUI's, but
> that may not be possible if it gives UI information that differs between
> GUI's.  I'm not sure how to handle this.  Obviously the hooks should be
> in common code (if at all possible), but the implementation of the popup
> will need to be gui-specific (although it's possible a function exists
> already that will do such a popup).

probably, but standardizing client reactions to server generated triggers 
would be a little more interesting :) besides, along with the generalization 
effort going along to get more mods, you really get into scenario development 
for those mods.

client triggers would be good for a first step it would give us some ideas on 
requirements for introducing triggers into the game itself (server). i think 
the best way to go about doing that is to define a nice clean trigger api 
that is capable of testing various conditions and then posting notifications 
back to the client. unfortunately, this is probably a non-trivial development.

later this api/implementation could be moved into the server and strapped on 
to the network interface for remote triggering.

andy