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

[Petr Baudis <pasky@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear diary, on Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 12:02:15AM CET, I got a letter,
where J?rg Zuther <zuther.joerg@xxxxxxxxx> told me, that...
> - 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.
- Please don't learn from the AI that "it was hard to code so it should be hard
to read" ;)

> 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?
Sounds nice, if you will be able to overtalk the AI. And obviously if you will
be able to get this patch into CVS. Also it would be nice if you would first
clean up the parts you are going to change, get this in as a separate patch and
then submit the main patch itself.

>    There's a patch from Gregor Zeitlinger splitting F_CARAVAN into the two
>    elemental abilities.
Yes - so, as a start, can you please have a deeper look at it and try to get it
into CVS?

>    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?
Smallest patches, best patches (in the scale of size, not quality - size helps
while reviewing; don't want to start this once again ;).

>    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?
If there's actually something which would help you, reactivate it, clean it up,
fix it, discuss about it and just try to get it into CVS. We have some good
patches, which didn't get into CVS just because lack of interest (so no reviews
etc).

> 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.
Sounds nice.

>    - there should be a column showing the continent/island the city is on.
Question is if we want people to know it. It can then help them in exploring
the right pieces of land and just give them knowledge they wouldn't otherwise
know. See appropriate discussion near generalized buildings patch.

>    - total of trading points generated by trading routes
Sounds nice.

>    - a set of columns (one for each unit type) which show the the number of
>    units of the respective unit type in the city.
Really neccessary? I rarely see zillion of units in one city, so they are
usually really easy to count manually at a glance.

>    - the same for buildings (well, of course showing only the (non)existence)
You can have multiple certain buildings in one city?

>    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.
Nice.

>    Overall, it seems to me that it this subject is much easier
>    to patch than the first one.
Sure. Maybe you would want to start with this, to get more familiar with the
code first.

-- 

                                Petr "Pasky" Baudis

UN*X programmer, UN*X administrator, hobbies = IPv6, IRC, FreeCiv, (e)links
.
The advantage of GUI is that you can see everything you can change.
The disadvantage of GUI is that you can change only what you can see.
.
Public PGP key, geekcode and stuff: http://pasky.ji.cz/~pasky/