[Freeciv-Dev] Re: new generalized calendars

[Raimar Falke <rf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Aug 25, 2002 at 02:43:32PM -0500, Mike Kaufman wrote:
> as promised, here is the new patch along with a couple of alternate
> game.rulesets so it can strut its stuff.
> 
> Problems:
> o endyear as an option is ignored
> o saving and loading dates from games is iffy. there's a year only hack
>   there now.
> o spaceship display is broken. should be converted to turns.
> o all sorts of references to years are still left everywhere. Raimar's
>   patch has a bunch of cleanup of these. I hope that he'll fold those
>   changes into this patch.

> o we probably need a "short_date" function, but that'll need alternate
>   formats. :(

You can also add DATE_SAVEFILENAME and DATE_NUMERIC.

> Good news:
> 
> to operate: best way to do this is:
> 
> % cd freeciv; mkdir rdir; cp game.ruleset-foo rdir/game.ruleset;
> % ser
> > rulesetdir ../rdir
> 
> Just to annoy Raimar, who used this example, game.ruleset-foo starts the
> game with the date:
> 
> "45 years after the death of King Foo in the Third Age"
> 
> so we can be quite flexible.
> 
> in data/default/game.ruleset is the documentation for the calendar.
> Please try and break it. I'm sure there are bugs.
> 
> Unfortunately there is a cheat. Certain freeciv rules (like the
> spaceship parts) are hardcoded. It ain't _that_ flexible. You can read
> all about that in the "builtins" section. Note that this is still a far
> cry from Raimar's lets hardcode everything approach, so I don't feel too
> bad.

It is nice that we agree at some points:
 - game.year should die
 - you can't exactly map from date to turn
 - this makes loading games hard/inaccurate
 - some behavior can't be specified via ruleset

But I also have to say that your patch is just an implementation of my
model. You just define one calendar which is medium customizeable via
rulesets. My model leaves it open if we have 3 or 4 (freeciv, AC, some
modpacks) very specific calendars or if we can create a common model
(like you have done) and use fewer calendars (one in the most extreme
case).

So if we agree that we include a simple counting calendar (like yours)
the discussion is now how general the this calendar should be. It
should be clear that we can't include everything (you agreed on this
when you added the "builtin" attribute).

I would like to remove the two tech dependencies. Tech is just
arbitrary. Same way as our spaceshipparts. On the other side is your
builtin feature useless in its current form. The leap year rule
changed in the past and the current one is only valid since
24. Febr. 1582. So you would need multiple leap year rules and also
the ability to specify the builtin attribute for every timeframe.

        Raimar

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