[Freeciv-Dev] Re: A bunch of patches

["andi payn" <paynfc@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: "Per I. Mathisen" <Per.Inge.Mathisen@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, andi payn wrote:
> > [calendar]
> I can't imagine a modpack writer would actually want to use
> nation-specific calendars, or lunar calendars for that matter. (But I
> might be wrong.) I think it would suffice to determine a starting
> year and an array list of "months". The year has as many months as
> found in this array, and each month is by default equal to one turn.
This would be pretty good; that way, you could actually make a quarterly or 
weekly calendar by specifying them as months. And it would be pretty easy to 
do, which is always nice....
Your game.ruleset could have something like this:

[calendar_20c]
name = _("20th Century")
first_year = 1900
turn_years = 1

[calendar_modern]
name = _("Modern Age")
first_year = 2000
turn_years = 0
months = _("Winter"), _("Spring"), _("Summer"), _("Autumn")

[calendar_future]
Name = _("The Future")
first_year = 2010
turn_years = 0
months = _("Jan"), _("Feb"), _("Mar"), _("Apr"), _("May"), _("Jun"), 
_("Jul"), _("Aug"), _("Sep"), _("Oct"), _("Nov"), _("Dec")
Then after 1999 (20th Century, 1 year/turn), you'd go to Winter 2000 (Modern 
Age, 4 turns/yr), etc., until Autumn 2009 (Modern Age, 4 turns/yr), then Jan 
2010 (The Future, 12 turns/yr), etc.
We could add a first_month value as well. So if The Future had first_month = 
7, you'd go from Spring 2010 to Jul 2010 (but the code would have to realize 
that 7/12 is next after 2/4).
The only thing is, I think some people might want campaigns played on a 
daily basis. In fact, Jason Short just posted:
> What a modpack writer would want, though, is some flexibility in
> setting the number of intervals per year.  I would think 4, 12, and
> 365.24 would probably be enough.
... and then made reference to leap years.

Without leap years, we could just do something like this:

[calendar_way_future]
name = _("Way Future")
first_year = 2015
turn_years = 0
months = _("Jan"), _("Feb"), _("Mar"), _("Apr"), _("May"), _("Jun"), 
_("Jul"), _("Aug"), _("Sep"), _("Oct"), _("Nov"), _("Dec")
month_days = 31, 28, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31
turn_days = 7

However, the simple 4 turns/year, 12 turns/year, etc. wouldn't work too well 
(who wants to see 52.143 turns/year?), so we'd probably need some way to 
make it say 1 season/turn, 1 month/turn, 7 days/turn, etc. I can't think of 
a good way to represent this in the ruleset, however.
I think you'd definitely want to be able to start an age in the middle of a 
year if you'd going daily (a normal age is 30-60 turns), but that's easy 
now--while a month wasn't a uniform measure, a day is.
So now we come to leapyear. I have a few different ideas (we could provide 
options for no leapyear, every 4 years, or Gregorian; or we could provide a 
set of variables to build up a formula; or we could provide arrays to 
explicitly specify everything), but I think the easiest solution is the 
best:
Do nothing in the code. Just specify a special age for the leapyear. An age 
is supposed to be in the neighborhood of 50 turns, so if you're playing at 
any pace where leapyears matter, you'll probably have a separate age for 
each year anyway.
I can probably get a new calendar patch together with the months, 
month_days, and first_day stuff in a day or so.
> Why not just paradrop-attack? Unit has zero movement, infinite
> paradrop & can attack on drop.
That's not a bad idea. In fact, I considered adding a flag for "can drop on 
occupied territory" for air freight or jetsetting spies, but this is a much 
better use for the same flag. And it's a really easy change.
> Convinced. It would actually be neat with a unit flag that makes the >unit
> unproducable. Eg "Dark Sorcery advance: Enables you to upgrade your
> useless Wizard's Apprentice units to kick-ass Dark Sorceror units"
I never thought of that, but it could be pretty cool, and it would be 
trivial to code.
> No, please don't wait for freeciv-ac. I don't follow that project but >I 
> suppose that could take a while.
Well, the big patch I uploaded includes the obsoleted_by2 stuff; I'll 
rewrite it to use obsoleted_by and upgradable_to arrays, and add the "can't 
build" flag, and try to make a proper patch out of it; this one isn't too 
deeply entangled with everything else.
> > I added two new unit types, actually. But some types of satellites
> > might be better handled by not being units at all. For example,
> > the SMAC satellites may be more appropriately handled as
> > improvements.
> They could populate space along with the spaceship...? Just an idea.
I was more worried about how they're handled in the code than how they're 
presented to the user. For that, the spaceship doesn't give us anything. I 
suppose the ultimate solution would be a CTP-style space layer, but that's 
not exactly trivial....
I was hoping to be able to use the existing unit and/or improvment code with 
minor changes to do everything I want without it being too much of a hack. 
If that's not possible, it's probably a big project, and probably belongs in 
freeciv-ac.

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