Re: Developer release of knightmare.g

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald@phy.cmich.edu>]

Lincoln Peters wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-01-03 at 14:48 -0800, Elijah Meeks wrote:
> 
>>I opened up knightmare.g and received an error
>>reporting that 'The unit type form has no property
>>named size-min' which seems to relate to the various
>>cities.  Was that meant to be a size-max?
> 
> No.  "size-min" is the minimum size that an advanced unit is allowed to
> be (e.g. a metropolis of size 1 would be a bit too weird).
> 
> It didn't give me any errors.  When did you last update your copy of
> Xconq?

An error would cause an abort. It was probably a warning.
And you may not have seen it if you started Knightmare from the command 
line:
	./xconq -g knightmare
as opposed to starting it from the GUI list of games. Add 'knightmare.g' 
to your 'game.dir' file in the 'lib' directory and then start it from 
the Tkconq games list, and see what happens.

>>Category 1 - Relatively Serious
>>1.  The AI builds ships in land-locked cities.
> 
> 
> Sounds like a bug in the "don't build ships without a shore" code,
> although I can't really be sure without studying that part of the AI.

You guys should look at 'minimal-sea-for-docks' which Hans added a year 
or more ago, I think. I doubt it ever got documented, since external 
documentation was not one of his strong points apparently. Also, it 
should have been named 'ai-minimal-sea-for-docks', but wasn't. Anyway:
(unit-type foo
   (minimal-sea-for-docks 30)
)

Actually, I thought 30 liquid cells was the default, so I am surprised 
that a naval unit is being built in a land-locked city. Maybe a new bug 
has arisen.

> Nothing particular, but I wouldn't be surprised if one or two game
> balance issues were to come up (e.g. maybe high-level units can be built
> too rapidly, or not rapidly enough).
> 
> And, of course, I'm hoping that you and a few other game developers can
> have some fun while helping me to test this thing more rapidly...

Yeah, I think it would be good if you and Elijah tested each other's 
stuff. You are both experienced Xconq game developers, and could provide 
useful feedback to each other. That way I could focus on bugfixes and 
the growing pile of feature requests. (Not that I mind testing your 
games; both of you have now made games that could keep me from touching 
Xconq code for weeks, while I, um, "playtested" them.)

Eric