Re: Several comments

[Stan Shebs <shebs@cygnus.com>]

   Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 12:25:48 +0100 (BST)
   From: Keir Novik <ken21@cam.ac.uk>

   The game-module instructions are described in the designer's manual as a
   list of strings, but only the first is displayed.  E.g. in

   (game-module "standard"
     (title "Standard Game")
     (blurb "The standard Xconq game, loosely based on WW II ca 1945")
     (instructions "Take over the world before you get taken over!"
		   "Type '?' for help."))

   the instructions on how to get help don't appear.

A property may only have a single object as its value, but you've tried
to give it two values.  Put the two strings in a list:

  ... (instructions ("Take over the world before you get taken over!"
		     "Type '?' for help.")))

   If you give a unit move-to orders to a non-adjacent cell containing
   another unit, why does it stop one cell short?

Um, because Xconq didn't use to allow stacking?  1/2 :-)  That's a good
point; the unit does enter the cell if it's entering a transport (as when
airplanes land in a city), but not if it would have to stack.

   I can't quite figure out how to use acp-night-effect.  I've set
   initial-day-part and day-length, but I never get any night effects.  Is
   this implemented?

Yes, this is *not* one of the many documented-but-not-implemented
things that I've been scrubbing...  Check out gettysburg.g.  You may
need to set the world's axial-tilt (OK, the name seemed like a good
idea at the time) and then the acp-night-effect.  Unfortunately, the X
interface doesn't actually darken the display the way the Mac
interface does, which makes it hard to know when things are working as
they should (I guess it would be clever to add a textual note
somewhere...)

   I'm not convinced I like the implementation of stack-order.  Currently,
   there is no way to get two different unit types visible in the same cell.
   (E.g. a battleship and a carrier in the standard game.)  If two units have
   the same stack-order, I think they should both be visible.

You mean enemy units I assume.  Right now the display of enemy units
is severely limited in its abilities.  I have a plan for how to fix
that, but it involves changing the representation of unit views from a
layer to a collection of view objects, and so I've been putting that
off.  If somebody else wants to do it, that would be great...

   On a positive note, I really like the coverage view.  The properties
   see-mistake-chance and looks-like are pretty cool too.  :)

View objects will make those behave a little less funkily too...

   I think that formations are much too loosely-held to be very useful.  If I
   tell a destroyer to hold formation in the same cell as a battleship, I
   don't want to see it wallowing three cells away!  Is it possible to tune
   the "tightness" of a formation?

The current default is to allow 1 cell of "slop" - but the problem with
destroyers and battleships is that destroyers are slower, so if the
battleship is the leader, the destroyer falls further and further behind.
You can partly work around by making the destroyer the leader.  Really
fixing would require that the leader be aware of its followers and
adjust its own actions to accommodate them, which in the case of
battleships means moving 3 and resting 1 each turn.

							Stan