[Freeciv-Dev] Re: non-existent technologies

[Mike Kaufman <kaufman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jan 31, 2003 at 08:22:17PM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Jason Dorje Short <vze49r5w@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
> > There are all sorts of other unnecessary ruleset dependencies in the 
> > savegames, for instance units are stored by ID rather than by name. 
> > This can be improved on greatly by avoiding using an "index" when a name 
> > can be used instead.  But it will still break if a unit is removed, for 
> > instance.  To get full compatability either a capstring is needed to 
> > match ruleset and savegame, or the savegame should store all needed 
> > inforamation about the ruleset it was originally played with.
> 
> I am in favor of any move away from magic numbers to readable tokens.
> The marginal extra space cost of storage and the marginal time cost of name

this is crap. marginal? I think not. you're talking about adding something
like 150k to each savegame (to store ruleset info). This is ludicrous. We
already store the name of the ruleset that was used to save the game. That
should be good enough. What happens if I don't happen to have the same
ruleset that the savegame was saved with? Should it simply refuse to load,
or should it try the best it can? Even with a system that stores names
rather than index, you're still screwed if you change the rulesets too much
anyway. If you don't include all the ruleset data, then this is almost a
worthless change, and including all the ruleset data is far too expensive.

-mike