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

[Andrew Sutton <ansutton@xxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 11 December 2001 04:40 am, Reinier Post wrote:
> > >Definitely, but is it worth the trouble?  I've never seen more than 30
> > >players at once on civserver.freeciv.org and they *never* ask to play
> > >with an alternative ruleset.  If the existing range of options in
> > > rulesets isn't being used, is it worthwhile to make the game more
> > > extensible?
> >
> > That is like saying there is no need for any options in Danish
> > supermarket products based on a market survey of only New Guinea
> > tribesman.
>
> Amazon customers, I would say.

huh?

> Well, I just wanted to make the point that you may not get very many
> developers or users on such a project, although it's technically the
> way to go.

possibly. you're probably right that not many of the current developers would 
sign off on it. but making the code more approachable may go along way to 
bringing in new developers.

> An alternative to starting from the ground up is to make the code
> C++-like in stages.  The first thing is encapsulation.  Make it a rule
> for every piece of data to be an object attribute, and for every piece of
> code that touches it to be in a class method for that class of object.
> E.g. for unit types, all the data structures would be in unittype.c and
> unittype.h would export only functions; it would be an error for anything
> else to touch the data directly.
>
> Is this a good first step?

probably not. i think any change in programming paradigm is worthy of a 
rewrite. slowly patching the current freeciv source tree to make it OO is too 
little too late. it can be done, but it won't yield any significant benefits, 
IMHO.

andy