[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Tidying savegames to pave the way for plug mapgens

[Raimar Falke <rf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 08:44:44AM -0400, Cameron Morland wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 11:35:55AM +0200, Raimar Falke wrote:
> > > General mapgen layout
> > > =====================
> > > A few bits of mapgen make more sense now (IMHO). Instead of requiring
> > > each generator to do everything, it can specify what it does by
> > > setting booleans, then default functions can be applied later. This
> > > should make the code tidier. 
> > > 
> > > Since making rivers depends on having a height map, I wrote a simple
> > > function to generate a heightmap given a tilemap.
> > 
> > Also this logic should be moved to the external program.
> 
> I'm trying to make it so that the external mapgenerator can be really
> simple, ie so it doesn't have to worry about all these details, but it
> can if it wants to. If an external generator wants to add rivers, it
> just needs to say "have_rivers_overlay", and provide the appropriate
> data. If it doesn't want to worry about rivers, the default algorithm
> will be run.

IMHO if we have the infrastructure to start external programs we
should use this and move all mapgen code out of the server.

So it looks like you want to make external mapgenerators easy and I
want the freeciv server code easy. Maybe it is possible that we both
get what we want. The server starts an external program. Some kind of
meta mapgen. Than a map generator can tell the meta mapgen to create
rivers or that the map generaror will provide the rivers by
themself. It should be possible that the user can set another map
generator at the server and so overriding the default meta
mapgen. This way no mapgen code is in the server and the meta mapgen
can support as much flexiblity as you want which makes plugin of new
mapgen parts (river creation, height-map creation,...) easy.

        Raimar

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