Re: growth agendas and OO

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

On Thu, 20 Nov 2003, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> Do you understand why Xconq won't get any bigger without certain
> infrastructural layouts?  

The C infrastructure is pretty good (as Peter points out in a 
later message); in fact, it is good enough that Xconq has gained 2 
developers in the past 5 months. Not bad....

As far as building the game goes (since that is actually the 
question at hand), the answer is: sure, it would be nice to have 
some additional infrastructure. You seem to have this "me vs. 
them" mentality though. When I suggested that _you_ could 
contribute your VS project, you became rather defensive, thinking 
that I somehow doubted your efforts. It would be nice if you would 
understand that, within the open source community, there is a kind 
of "altruism", that if you accomplish something positive then you 
share it with others.

I didn't build this particular piece of infrastructure because I 
didn't *need* it.

>But... some have a growth agenda, and others don't.

I have a personal growth agenda for Xconq. It goes something like 
this:
  Pre-7.5:
    (1) Fix all known stability issues and crashing bugs.
    (2) Verify documentation correctness and add more exposition 
where necessary. Possibly spiff up the HTML version of the 
manuals.
    (3) Make sure that all the test cases pass muster. Possibly 
enhance the testing system. (Although the normal use of skelconq 
is to be invoked with arguments, it should probably not assume 
that this is the case, as you pointed out and as I also noticed 
some time ago.)
  Post-7.5/Pre-7.6:
    (1) Make a badass AI.
    (2) Do some work with the tasking/planning system (related to 
AI work, but some make-user-life-easier things also).
    (3) Possibly extend GDL.
    (4) Possibly extend the standing orders syntax.
    (5) Possibly work on SDL/? interface.

> I am willing to contribute to the OO-ification of Xconq, if you want to
> pursue that agenda.  If you think that agenda is misguided, then it's
> best to find out now.

I don't think that this is necessarily misguided in the long term. 
But the C infrastructure works pretty darn good at present. We 
even have some "polymorphism" due to nifty macro magic....

Xconq currently attempts to be at a C89 compliance level to make 
sure that we are supporting as many platforms as possible. If you 
say that we should just ditch those platforms, then you are simply 
stating an opinion which is not even all that pragmatic.  I 
actually did put out a feeler a while ago, to see about moving the 
compliance level to C99; the conclusion I reached is that the 
time is not right yet.

Eric