[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Wishlist: Automatically increasing timer (PR#1298)

["Per I. Mathisen" <Per.Inge.Mathisen@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 12 Mar 2002, Mike Kaufman wrote:
> attached is a toy patch which allows you to have an increasing timer
> with rather flexible options. The reason that it's a toy patch is that
> you must set the options in the source and then recompile.
>
> Reason for this: it requires four new server options and an extra state
> variable in a savefile. Also, I just wanted to get this out here, so
> there could be some discussion as to the effectiveness of this solution
> (i.e. is it flexible enough for everybody?)

Actually, I think it may be too flexible. Let's not make this option too
hard for users to understand with a cursory glance at its description.

My own idea of how to solve this was to put a timer increase as an option
in citystyles in cities.ruleset. I played around with that idea a bit but
then it got all out of hand and I ended up rewriting cities ruleset as
ages ruleset, and I had to take a step back to take another look at the
whole thing... ;)

> An better way to do this would be to condense the four new variables
> into 1 or even into game.timeout. This would require hacking stdinhand
> to handle multivariable options:
>
> set timeout 30 25 0 30 30

Well, stdinhand already handles multivariable options. Sort of.

> or
>
> set timeout 30  # with the rest as defaults

Or
        set timeout 30 20 5     # timer=30, incr by 5 every X=20th turn
        set timeout 30 20 5 10  # ditto, but add 10 to X every increase
        set timeout 30 20 5 0 2 # instead multiply X by 2 every incr

:)

> for example. The nice thing is that registry.c handles this type of
> thing ok (apparently), so savegames are not the big issue.
>
> Per, you want to have a go at this? You were just fooling around with
> stdinhand...

Sure, I'll have a go at it.

Yours,
Per

"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch."
 -- Jack Nicholson