Re: What to do with Xconq

[Stan Shebs <shebs at shebs dot cnchost dot com>]

Ari Rabkin wrote:
> 
>     And the ones that do work need to be better documented.

Sigh, more writing - doesn't anybody else want to do some of this?

> > * Genre confusion.  These days, strategy games fall into several
> > subcategories - historical wargames (TOAW), complex simulations (Civ),
> > real-time (*arcraft), and maybe strategic RPG (HOMM 3).  Xconq doesn't
> > offer strong support for any of these genres, instead falling into a
> > mushy middle of simple-ish turn-based games.
> 
>     I have noticed that all xconq games seem alike.  This isn't good:
> the player should have to act and think differently in each game, not
> just exploit the same strategies.

A good observation.  This is probably a side-effect of unimplemented
scorekeeper types, combined with lack of support code in the mplayer,
so every game's goal has to be to wipe out the other player.

>     2)    Civilization is more than a war game; there is the dimension
> of economics, science, and city management.  Civ nations are not always
> at war or in (like the sides in some xconq games) perpetual alliance.
> Xconq is able to do science and economics to some extent with the "advanced
> city" code, but diplomacy is still a giant gap.

Yeah, that's what agreements are supposed to be for, but that's something
that turned out to be a bigger job than I originally expected...

>     I think rules, and particularly the combat model is more important
> here: the "civilization[-2]" combat model is a good addition.  Perhaps
> we should have one to allow exact emulation of those cardboard-counter
> war games?  This would entail at most a reworking of the combat stregth
> code added for the Civ game, and would allow xconq to leverage the
> playtesting, research, etc that went into military baord games.

That's why I gave the attack/defense strength unit properties such generic
names, so they can be used with additional combat models.  Ideally, each combat
models is a blob of C code, part of which calculates the effects, and part of
which provides generic risk/odds assessment for AIs to use.
 
>     I find overhead views easier to work with, actually.  And 3d animation
> is probably a waste of time.  It isn't, at least for me, a concern.

An interesting side-effect of isometric that I noticed when tinkering with it;
it doubles the number of cells visible on the screen, with a slight cost to
visibility when things overlap sometimes.

>     Could the option of using squares be added to xconq without a lot
> of work?

It could be added; in fact, I chose the term "cell" to encompass both squares
and hexes.  Would be a lot of work though - while many iterations use things
like for_all_directions that would work the same for squares and hexes,
not all the code is so generic (pathfinding for instance), and squares also
entail 4-neighbor vs 8-neighbor issues (face vs corner adjacency).  Lots of
graphics interface hacking too...

I've been holding off on this one because I don't want it to be half-done,
and the other issues are more pressing right now.

> > * Focus on a handful of game modules, and finish them.  One or two in
> > each Xconq-supported genre should be enough.  Do the graphics, make
> > the AI good, etc.
> 
>     makes sense--perhaps raffle them off to managers so that there is
> someone specifically dedicated to each game?  I know that ANE is the
> personal creation of Hans Ronne, who also checked in a lot of code
> specifically for it --and it is already very highly polished, despite
> being the newest xconq game.  Kudos, Hans!

They're pretty much all available to be worked on, so if no one is working
on a game module, I tend to assume it's because they're not that interested.
Perhaps I should clarify - if anybody wants to work on a module, go for it.
Notify the list so other people don't repeat your work, and also speak up
if the base code should be extended to support something you need to do!

>     An interesting thought; perhaps try to combine features of multiple
> genres?  Age of Empires is an attempt at a Civ RTS mix, and seems to be
> a success.  Perhaps we should try something similar?

"ancient.g" is my idea of an AoE clone - it motivated me to add the
collecting task.  Yes, it's unfinished too... :-(

> A "modern times"
> civ game?  I can't say: but doing a combination of genres is something
> xconq should be good at.

That's a good observation!

>     I just had the following thought: with the Civ2 emulation
> work already done, writing a small program to convert the many
> Civ2 Gold scenarios to xconq-readable format.

That's a really neat idea!  I'm guessing that people have figured
out the file format by now.  Translating squares to cells is perhaps
the hardest bit, but there is a formula.

Stan