Features for post v0.4

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eleazar
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Features for post v0.4

#1 Post by eleazar »

I've updated the roadmap. We've achieved everything listed "currently under development", though many of those features could/should be enhanced further. So there is nothing listed for now.


Besides content enhancements (like streamlining the tech tree) which should be ongoing, i have two areas i'd like to focus development attention on early in v0.5.

1) Outposts
Outposts cause a fair amount of confusion due to their implementation as limited colonies. Since the concept of what outposts should be, is pretty well established (i.e. population-less bases that don't produce resources), this feature could probably finished up pretty quick.


2) Macros
At Wesnoth we called this feature "macros". I don't know if that a meaningful name or not, but i'll explain:

Two major areas of content i'd like to improve are Resource Production, and Species differentiation. Currently the effects scripting resource production and everything else needs to be replicated for every species, so i've left it essentially the same for every species, so changes can easily be changed across the board with find/replace. It seems to me prohibitively complicated and highly error prone to try to change the general rules of resource production and diversify the species at the same time.

That's where "macros" come in.

A macro would be a bit of effects scripting that could be referenced in various places. For instance i could define three different macros "Lousy_Miner", "Average_Miner", and "Great_Miner". Then instead of repeating the effects scripting for mining in every species definition, i could just call one of the Mining macros. I don't know how hard that would be to implement, but there are huge gains in readability and maintainability for the content scripting. And i can start implementing species distinctive while work on resource production is ongoing.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Features for post v0.4

#2 Post by Geoff the Medio »

I was tinkering with having named effects groups, which would be a way to replace an effects group definition in some other bit of content with a name, which would refer to an effects group defined elsewhere. However, a more general and useful function would be to allow arbitrary scripting text to be defined and referred to using a "macro" substitution. This would be done as a preprocessing step for the scripting file, and would work just like stringtable substitutions. This sort of macro substitution wouldn't need to know anything about what an effects group is (or other specific format of content, like a condition or list of environment preferences) and wouldn't be limited to substitutions of just effects groups; any bit of scripting text could be put into a macro and substituted into any bit of scripting definitions. The parsing of the text would be done after the subsitution... This is probably the most useful and flexible method of doing this for scripters, although it would miss out on a slight reduction in memory use to store the defined content, which could be reduced by reusing specific content chunks, like a named effects group, in which case only one copy of the the named effects group would need to be stored, and anything that referred to it by name would not need a separate copy. This probably isn't an important benefit, though.

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eleazar
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Re: Features for post v0.4

#3 Post by eleazar »

I'm glad you understood what i mean by "macros."


So Geoff, is the a major feature you particularly want to work on for v0.5?

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Features for post v0.4

#4 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:So Geoff, is the a major feature you particularly want to work on for v0.5?
Is there a word missing in that question?

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eleazar
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Re: Features for post v0.4

#5 Post by eleazar »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
eleazar wrote:So Geoff, is there a major feature you particularly want to work on for v0.5?
Is there a word missing in that question?
Fixed

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Features for post v0.4

#6 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:So Geoff, is there a major feature you particularly want to work on for v0.5?
I don't have a single major feature I want to add next, but by default, I suspect the next major addition will / should be species-empire interactions.

Some basic diplomacy will probably also be useful - just war / peace options.

I would also like to rework food and visibility, and add a few (hopefully) fun mini-features, like novas and moving space storms.

A strategic resource system would also be nice, though I'm not sure how major of an addition that would be... It could actually be quite small, if interface issues don't complicate things too much.

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Re: Features for post v0.4

#7 Post by Dart00_Tech »

Dont forget about my short (long) laundry list of ideas and suggestions! :D

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=6497

Hint: The one about changing "Construction" to a more accurate term: "Infrastructure" would be the easiest thing to do...

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Features for post v0.4

#8 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Dart00_Tech wrote:Dont forget about my short (long) laundry list of ideas and suggestions!
There is a difference between features and smaller fixes and tweaks. "More tooltips" or "rename Construction" are the latter.

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Re: Features for post v0.4

#9 Post by Dart00_Tech »

Idk....a few of those would seem like pretty major features to me? lol 8)

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eleazar
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Re: Features for post v0.4

#10 Post by eleazar »

Discussions of the specific features of outposts should happen in the outpost thread. I just moved a comment there.

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