[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#8455) Bombardment (aka ranged attack)

["rwetmore@xxxxxxxxxxxx" <rwetmore@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=8455 >


I agree/sympathize completely ... neither extreme is viable and
while the competitive balancing act is good, it is trying.

But the real fun of Freeciv is the ability to play all the
variant flavours and switch between them, or tweak the rules one
absolutely *hates*.


I'm happy to have goals and wishlists more or less agreed on (if
they follow the above sentiments of course), and an understanding that
implementation must not conflict/reverse them. But also, that the
default option mode is the hardcoded/locked down mode, and may not
even have code completed to execute or unlock it for experimentation
in all cases. Only code which is needed for the tested templates is
absolutely required and required to be 100% robust.

I do think that a common framework for doing this is not a big deal
but will take incremental adjustments over time to get it fully in
place, e.g. following a standard initialization flow for a windowing
model vs old functional model program everywhere.


Fine tuning is providing a set of template options (probably the
hardcoded defaults in 90% of the cases) that are tested as part
of a release. On the rest the user is left to their own with the
caveat "on your head be it".

But if you give them templates, the changes are likely to be adding
or removing a few things, often just to give one feature in an
alternate template, which is basically what the Civ variants do now.


Cheers,
RossW
=====

Per I. Mathisen wrote:
> <URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=8455 >
> 
> On Mon, 5 Apr 2004, rwetmore@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
[...]
> <rant>
> 
> This idea that everything should be configurable or optional is annoying
> me no end. It is a downwards spiral that does not seem to end until we
> hand the user a C compiler and tell him that he now has everything he
> needs to implement his own Turing machine.
> 
> We should identify the real _needs_ for configurability, as in "what game
> mechanics will this allow that people may want to use in a modpack", not
> as in "it is entirely possible that someone somewhere will want to run
> freeciv with this option tuned a little bit different than everyone else".
> 
> Instead of catering to the tiny percentage of users who might want to fine
> tune their own freeciv ruleset, we should work to fine tune the default
> freeciv ruleset for everybody.
> 
> Example: tech_cost_style (www.freeciv.org/lxr/source/common/tech.c#L344).
> How many players have tested this? It sounds really good. The code is
> presumably still good, after I discovered and fixed some bugs two years
> ago that had been there, undetected for quite a while. Briefly before the
> 1.13.0 release we tried to make tech_cost_style 1 the new default. Turns
> out, this option was not really thought through very well. The resulting
> tech cost curve was not workable (nor was it intended or documented), so
> we reverted back to the old default again. But the option was not fixed,
> and it is still not good, although it still looks like a nice
> configurability option. How many other options, almost never used, are in
> the same shape? I don't know. Nobody knows. That is _not_ good. It is a
> false pretense of configurability.
> 
> </rant>
> 
>   - Per