Macrotools

Message

Aquitaine · #31 Post by **Aquitaine** » Sun Jul 04, 2004 4:55 pm

Also moved this to Rants and Raves.

Aquitaine · #32 Post by **Aquitaine** » Mon Jul 05, 2004 1:44 pm

vishnou00 was banned this morning.

I'm not really too keen on setting a precedent whereby I need to defend decisions to ban people, but in his case, I think an explanation is warranted.

In the past, the people we've had on this forum who have been uncooperative have typically been obvious about it. From the beginning, they simply didn't show the requisite decorum that is so important to this process, and so when they were banned, nobody was surprised.

vishnou00 was not one of these people. He was animated in his disagreement with the way some of the public reviews are going -- ironically, I share a great deal of his perspective, but the mouthpiece for his views was needlessly provocative. His attitude was that of an oppressed martyr, fighting against the impossible odds of scary people like myself or drek or tzlaine, and that the service he would do to the project was worth whatever cost.

Frankly, that attitude stinks. Our design process may get heated, but I won't permit the kind of acrimonious pettifogging that was rapidly becoming vishnou00's trademark. He was warned yesterday after his conduct in this thread, and he disregarded that warning.

As a designer, I am sorry to lose him, because his input was quite valuable. But as someone responsible for the integrity of this community, I won't miss him.

-Aq

vishnou00 · #33 Post by **vishnou00** » Wed Jul 07, 2004 12:20 am

I'm back.

I sincerely regret my behaviour that justified my ban and intend to respect the community
guidelines.

I'll refrain to dwell in the issues surrounding my ban, unless directly prompted. If this unlikely situation occur, I intend to keep it private, as to pollute the forum no more.

Aquitaine · #34 Post by **Aquitaine** » Wed Jul 07, 2004 3:21 am

After a week or so, unless there's anything in this thread that anybody wants to keep, I'm all for deleting the whole thing.

Aq

drek · #35 Post by **drek** » Wed Jul 07, 2004 3:34 am

The thread was orginally meant to be in response to a request from noelte, but I think Tyreth gave him a much better answer back in the orginal thread.

I have no objections whatsoever to this thread being deleted or locked. I should have posted it to rant and rave to begin with, and then ignored it after the first page.

oops.

noelte · #36 Post by **noelte** » Wed Jul 07, 2004 6:42 am

drek wrote:The thread was orginally meant to be in response to a request from noelte, ...

That's true. And i didn't ever took part in the argueing, did i? At the end i hadn't something to add. I have to admit that i agreed mostly with your first post. The only thing i still disagree with is that design has to follow a general order to avoid those tools. Which i feel is sometimes the case. After all i take for an fact that decision are made based on all arguments even those which fight micro argument which use of some (ai less) tool.

drek wrote:I have no objections whatsoever to this thread being deleted or locked. I should have posted it to rant and rave to begin with, and then ignored it after the first page.

I would like to see this thread locked rather than been deleted. This way new people can look here first, before they try to argue. It's the same as realism argument.

Ronald.

After all i feel sometimes that there are to much things cut away, which i enjoyed in moo/moo2. But as long as all decision are made base of argument and the way most people think, i have to take it. Because fo is open source, i still hope, that i can change some parts after v1.0 to my likeing (if i manage to stay that long:-) ).

#37 Post by **Tyreth** » Wed Jul 07, 2004 7:09 am

noelte wrote: After all i feel sometimes that there are to much things cut away, which i enjoyed in moo/moo2. But as long as all decision are made base of argument and the way most people think, i have to take it. Because fo is open source, i still hope, that i can change some parts after v1.0 to my likeing (if i manage to stay that long:-) ).

Well, it's my hope that this will happen after 1.0 so that there are more games to play than just the official campaign. Our community should ultimately be one that supports and encourages modders once FO is ready for that.

Ellestar · #38 Post by **Ellestar** » Wed Jul 07, 2004 8:41 am

noelte wrote:This way new people can look here first, before they try to argue.

Well, i know that it loses a former meaning without context, but it's funny

Ragnar · #39 Post by **Ragnar** » Wed Jul 07, 2004 1:12 pm

Glad to see you all worked it out, and unbanned visnou00.

I agree with noelte; just lock the thread. It helps to understand and see the past arguments. I too, had asked to see the evidence that macrotools would not work.
I still think there is some misunderstanding of the definition of "macrotool". I hate the AI governor bots, but love a flexible UI that lets me paint in broad strokes. The UI is what I was thinking for macrotools.

Edit: I was just thinking; there seems to be a relatively large minority that would want to use these tools and see production localized. As a compromise, can the coders write the code it such a way to allow that aspect to be easily modded when the time comes? I'm sure I would like to play both versions!

Aquitaine · #40 Post by **Aquitaine** » Wed Jul 07, 2004 1:38 pm

Unfortunately, I don't see that we can ask the programmers to code it both ways, or even one-and-a-half ways. It would be premature to do so anyway. Modding FO before we get to at least v0.6 or v0.7 wouldn't have much point to it.

noelte · #41 Post by **noelte** » Wed Jul 07, 2004 1:48 pm

Aquitaine wrote:Unfortunately, I don't see that we can ask the programmers to code it both ways, or even one-and-a-half ways. It would be premature to do so anyway. Modding FO before we get to at least v0.6 or v0.7 wouldn't have much point to it.

As i understand modding it's not possible to change coded features. For instance replacing the foci system with something else. To me, there are at least three parts of fo which i plan to change after fo is released. (if i still feel that i miss them when playing v1.0) In general, you can't ask the programmers to code several systems in parallel. But since i'm part of the programming team i (will) have enough insights to do those things.

EDIT: I didn't saw that Ragnar had changed his post as i wrote mine. But i agree with aq, both systems (for pool production) work in very different ways, that's why you have to decide which one you take.

Ragnar · #42 Post by **Ragnar** » Wed Jul 07, 2004 1:54 pm

I'm not a programer, I'm sure my ignorance shows.

I wasn't asking for coding of both way, just doing it the one way, in such a way that it could be changed by a modder without massive difficulty. Oh well.

Aquitaine · #43 Post by **Aquitaine** » Wed Jul 07, 2004 3:16 pm

It could be changed by a modder, yeah, but it's not as simple as just editing a text or an XML file. It would involve UI changes, core engine logic changes ... so yeah, it's moddable, depending on how you define a modder.

#44 Post by **Geoff the Medio** » Wed Jul 07, 2004 4:38 pm

Any "modification" is possible, since FO is open source.

If you have the skill, patience and complier, anyway.

vishnou00 · #45 Post by **vishnou00** » Wed Jul 07, 2004 6:43 pm

Ragnar wrote:Glad to see you all worked it out, and unbanned visnou00.

noelte wrote:have enough insights to do those things.

From what I have heard and seen in the code, there are some features that are almost there in the code (at least there is the groundwork to do them).

For example, offroading. Now, there is no offroading in the design, but the the pathfinding code support offroading. I didn't look at that part of the code, but that would be the hardest part to code to add support for offroading in the game, imho. It will probably require a good deal of testing, but it shouldn't break the rest of the code (game design aspects like balance will probably suffer).

Another example is building (local or empire level). Right now, there is empire pooling of food, mineral and research. The result of public review is that production will be at the empire level. In the code, that means that there is one ressource pool for production and one build queue per empire. To have local production, one would have to have one pool and prod. queue per planet or system. It won't be as simple as it sound, as it will require the work of someone who understand the code of all the affected parts, which include at least: planets or system, empire, turn generation and many parts of the UI. Elements like the save game format and messages that go through the network won't require much work (rewrite of the functions that decide which elements are sent to the xml and how they are loaded back, but these are pretty much dump of the objects' members).

Something I haven't seen though is cargo ship. But I guess it would be a ressource pool attached to a ship component or hull and a plethora of new code for UI and transport orders (and a ton of game design to make it fun).

Like Geoff said, it isn't moddable like a closed source game (through internal scripting and data manipulation), but you can take what have been already done and add/change whatever you want. But if you start a different branch, it may be difficult to use elements developped in other branches.