[Freeciv-Dev] Hello; Elementarization of Unit Properties; New/Improved Info Screens

[Jörg Zuther <zuther.joerg@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I'm new on this list and want to contribute to the project
for several reasons:

- I enjoy civ-style games very much; this is an opportunity
  to make my wishes becoming reality.
- Learning C.
- Learn what it means to program a game.

OK, I want to work on the following subjects:

1. Elementarization of unit poperties:

   Many properties/abilities are organized as a bunch, i.e.
   (see unittype.h/enum unit_flag_id)
   F_SETTLERS (contains all the worker abilities like irrigation,
               roads, mines, removing pollution, etc.)
   F_CARAVAN (contains helping wonders, establishing trade routes)
   F_DIPLOMAT (contains all diplomatic abilities)

   Imho, it would be nice to have any elementary property/ability
   like road building and mining as an ability/property of its own
   that can be chosen for new unit types. E.g., you could design
   a unit called "railroad workers" that can only build railroads.
   (This example leads to another feature I would be interested in:
   to give all working abilities a respective effectiveness factor
   that can be chosen for each unit type. Maybe the flags could be
   replaced by integers that reflect the respective effectiveness,
   with 0 means that the unit type has not the respective ability/
   property.)
   What do you think?

   There's a patch from Gregor Zeitlinger splitting F_CARAVAN into
   the two elemental abilities.

   I have begun with the F_SETTLERS split but encountered many
   difficulties in the AI and elsewhere. For example, it seems
   that best_role_unit in  unittype.c needs an overhaul so that
   it can test any combination of required properties/abilities
   of a unit. I fear that this patch could grow huge. Maybe it
   would be better first to analyse the necessary changes for the
   split patch and to put those changes into a set of other
   patches first, and make the split patch at last?

   Furthermore, has anyone made major changes to unittype.c?
   It is very likely that my patch would affect these changes
   in a nontrivial way. How should this be handled? Building
   my patch onto existing but still not included ones? Or
   do it on the basis of the current version?

2. New or more detailed charts:

   E.g. in the cities chart,
   - the columns "workers", "surplus", "economy" and "currently
     building" should be splitted into several columns,
     respectively, so that you can sort wrt each elementary
     information.
   - there should be a column showing the continent/island the
     city is on.
   - total of trading points generated by trading routes
   - a set of columns (one for each unit type) which show the
     the number of units of the respective unit type in the city.
   - the same for buildings (well, of course showing only the
     (non)existence)

   Example for a new chart: The unit chart
   - lists informations for each unit you have. You can center
     on each unit on the list by double-clicking it
   - columns for coordinates
   - column for goto-target (city or tile) 
   - there should be a column that shows the damage status or
     something like that
   - column for nearest friendly city
   - column for nearest hostile city
   - etc.

   Overall, it seems to me that it this subject is much easier
   to patch than the first one.

Best,

Jörg Zuther
http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/~zuther