Re: Clearing the Air (long)

[Stan Shebs <shebs@apple.com>]

It's almost never a good idea to guess that there must be secret evil
intent, and react as if that were really the case. There are about a
half-dozen interconnected ideas being kicked around, and I think
everybody is operating with different assumptions, some of which have
probably not been written down yet.

To put things in perspective, this is a depth of modelling that the
professional game designers don't even want to get into; if you
"deconstruct" an A-list game, you'll see that they carefully restrict
the rules, for instance to avoid stacks of units entirely by making
each unit have a physical size in a fine-grained coordinate system.
And of course the rules themselves have minimal variability. One of
Xconq's attributes is a high degree of flexibility, but as we've
seen many times, it can be difficult to take advantage of it; try
something really exotic in a game module, and interfaces are
unintelligible, the AI doesn't know what to do, etc.

So the goal is to find a set of parameters that model the kinds
of games you want to be able to play, but that means that you
need to start with an agreement about what those games are.
Just a "might want to" or "would be nice" is not enough; Xconq
is littered with stubbed-out code that started with that thought
and was never finished. Do we want to enhance the standard
game, add new tactical possibilities to the panzer game, design
new games that weren't possible before, what? After all, this
whole discussion started with Hans just trying to fix bugs...

Stan