[Freeciv-Dev] Re: HELP wanted: ruleset debugging

[Ben Webb <ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Sep 30, 2002 at 12:16:41PM +0200, Davide Pagnin wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-09-30 at 01:34, Miguel Farah wrote:
> > I have version 0.1 of my _Mare Infinitus_ modpack ready. I playtested 
> > it, and found something strange: some of the city improvement effects 
> > are "shifted" one building up: the city requires an airport instead of 
> > an aqueduct to grow beyond size 8; building a granary yields the 
> > effects in food production of the harbour, and so on.
> 
> Perhaps you don't consider that building effects are hardcoded and thus,
> modifying the ruleset means a little more than nothing to freeciv?

        Having looked at the Mare buildings.ruleset, I can confirm
Davide's statement: this odd behaviour is seen because the building
effects are hardcoded. For example, a city always requires the second
building in the rulesets file to grow beyond size 8. In the default
rulesets, this building is the Aqueduct; in yours, it's the Airport.
Current Freeciv CVS ignores the "effect" field in buildings.ruleset.
(This is mentioned in the NEWS file, but you have to look carefully. ;)

> If you have the time and the passion, you can enjoy the gen-impr patch,
> that Ben is carrying on and that aims to solve this problem.

impr-gen (or gen-impr) should be able to handle the effects you've
defined in your ruleset. If you don't want to use it, however, you need
to be more careful in defining the ruleset; keep the buildings in the
same order, and don't add any new ones. You can effectively remove
buildings by setting their tech_req to "Never" though.

> (At the moment the patch isn't included in CVS and perhaps there will be
> some time before this will happen, but I hope that you will use that
> patch and as a modpack writer, any suggestion/observation you can send
> about that patch, will be welcomed by Ben)

Yes, I always welcome suggestions!

        Ben
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