[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Development Strategies [Was Documentation, Usability and Development]

[Jules Bean <jules@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 11:21:28AM -0500, Daniel L Speyer wrote:
> 
> Do you really think we can anticipate more than a very small fraction of
> the ideas potential-ruleset-makers may come up with?  

Put it this way:

I think we can anticpate enough to enable the creation of modpacks
interestingly and significantly different from freeciv, in a simple
framework.

I certainly don't claim that there won't be things that every modpack
designer wants to do but can't.  However, look at any number of
commercial games with fairly inflexible unit editing possibilities --
Myth, for example -- which spawned a *massive* load of modpacks, some
fairly good.

> Furthermore, if new unit powers are written in C, then they can't be used
> multi-player until everybody (roughly including
> civserver.freeciv.org) upgrades.  This is a gross violation of
> "release early, release often".

Yes, of course.

> 
> And why should new unit powers be written in C?  The language is slower to
> write in and much more prone to bugs (no array checking, have to do
> pointers manually...).  Now C does have its performance advantages, but
> how often will this code be called (especially if the default units don't
> use anything interpereted)?

Absolutely.

[snip more good reasons, which begin to be a specification of a good
scripting language]

Oh yes.  I don't claim that a freeciv with scriptable units and
improvements wouldn't be a fantabulously excellent toy.  On the
contrary, it would be "Awesome, Dude!".

All I'm saying is that the rigid framework approach is much easier to
program and think out, and may be acheivable in a much shorter
timespan and still be interesting.

After all, people were talking about scripting freeciv when I first
came on the scene here several years ago (and I wrote a few long posts 
about it, I think) and nothing's happened yet...

Jules

PS One serious downside of a totally scriptable system is it will make 
the AI orders of magnitude harder, I think.