This is amusing timing, since I read the Wikipedia articles on Dijkstra and "Considered Harmful" yesterday.
2009/3/18 Per Inge Mathisen <per.mathi...@gmail.com>: > As for Warzone, we are facing the same issues, just that we are now > where Freeciv was ten years ago. Our mean number of working, complete > mods is zero. That is, if we do not count Rebalance, which is an > exception that pretty much proves my point, since not only was the mod > absorbed into our core, we even assimilated its developer... ;-) So > let's not make the same mistakes that Freeciv did. Users in general > are not going to learn the arcane switches and incantations necessary > for making mods work (--mod_mp?), and as long as we refuse to greatly > simplify the way mods are treated, we will not be able to offer an > appealing user interface for users to access them. As others have mentioned, WarZombie is a mod that's fairly popular. And we don't have more mods because we don't have many players, because none of us feel like marketing Warzone until 2.2. At least, that's when I'm holding off my marketing for. I keep on planning to write to Ask Slashdot to call for developers, but I never get around to it. And this is more an argument for a better mod interface than anything else. > What we need first and foremost is an easier way for users to create, > distribute and download maps. I have the "distribute and download" part on my to-do list. I'll leave it to the others to handle the "create" part. > After that we need a better way to offer users a way to install and > play total modifications. Those are either new campaigns, or totally > different and network incompatible multiplayer/skirmish games using > their own AIs and own game data. Overriding base game data is a risky > way to create them, since even small changes to non-overridden base > data could break it. So the best way to create them is to replace > everything. Then we can offer a menu where such conversions can be > chosen. In other words, what we want to do is take our existing mod interface, and make sure only one can run at a time. This is a good idea, and completely different from discarding the entire mod support code. And it's kind of assumed that mods will be network incompatible. I'm thinking mods should have some sort of network compatibility flag indicating this. > As for the small mods that just change one or two things, like > increasing mg firepower or adding flying trucks... I dare say they are > by and large not needed, and won't be used, except as a proof of > concept. For that you can use ordinary patches to the core game data, > and deal with them like we deal with code patches. In the long run, > supporting them is probably harmful. Lies. I think a lot of them are important and in demand. And though mods aren't exactly trivial to implement, I daresay it's easier than downloading and compiling trunk. Especially for distribution. > So in order to get good support for user modifications, we should > remove support for mods. Though I disagree, I do think we should merge mp.wz and warzone.wz back together. Although I think sequences.wz should remain separate. We should add loading code for sequences.wz, by the way. It's currently, as far as I know, impossible to load sequences.wz without treating it as a mod. -Zarel _______________________________________________ Warzone-dev mailing list Warzone-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/warzone-dev
