Any enthusiasm for a remake out here?

[Catwalk]

Production could be allowed to carry over, while still only letting one item be completed each turn.

Production costs 4 gold if no production has been done, 3 gold if less than a third is done and 2 if more than a third is done. I think this is a good system personally. I'd disable ladder buying (buy spearmen => buy barracks => buy library => buy city walls => buy university = you're paying the low cost for all of it).

[VM]

Is tehre a generally egreed-upon set of deviations from the original that should be followed? Can I have a list?

[WhiteMage]

OK VM, I think you are right. Making the game easy to modify later should solve most of these problems. In case you are unsure, you can follow the original game. Making 1/100th instead of floating point representations seems to be a good solution to me. How about 1/1000th?

Regarding having a generally agreed-upon set of deviations, the answer is a HUGE NO. Look at our past history of years of postings. Thousands of ideas and no agreement even on most of the basic decisions. Sorry Catwalk, but none of your ideas have seen any sunshine so far, although you proposed implementations to be realized by December 2010. Please go back and finish the Catnip project first and I kindly ask you to stay away from this new programming project until we have a version 1.0. At that point mods can be discussed and programmed. With colliding ideas and wasteful contradicting postings, nothing will be achieved, just like last time. For your Catnip project I made my contribution, but you disappeared for 8 months and nothing was achieved. I like you personally Catwalk, but for the sake of the highest chance of success of this programming project, please wait with your ideas until we have some demo-able version. VM’s time is very precious, we should not abuse it! Thank you.

[kyrub]

Hi again, nice little project you have here, VM.

@Whitemage
Catwalk is not to blame for the unfinished state of his project, it's me actually. I was exhausted after the last MoM patch and simply could not / did not want to put any more work into it. And (while you may have your reason to tell him away) he was not suggesting any mod as you said, it was the other way round: you were suggesting a change (mod) and he was defending the original.

I feel I have no rights to interfere in the VM's project, so I just want to put my single vote to "remake precisely the original, make it very flexible" as WhiteMage suggested. That should satisfy anybody. (Although the non-conservation of overlapping production / research / population is mightily annoying and I think everybody wants it out.)


Contribution for Remaster... don't know if it's needy (?). Right now, 95% of my time goes to my ever-growing family, so my hands are tied for anything bigger. If VM needs, I could reproduce the combat algorithm in simple logical steps. It's much more complicated than what was cited above. Many factors enter the equation.

[WhiteMage]

Yes, but on the other hand, he was proposing the ladder buying denial mod. So now VM sees 2 mods + original. In the other threads he posted hundreds of mod ideas and the entire Catnip project is a huge mod. I just wanted to make an early stopping attempt before we see the same diverse postings as we did in the past. More disagreement = less progress. I will only program AI for 1 mod (why? because even that will take years!). If my preferred mod does not exist, I will not program AI. So for AI’s reason that mod should be programmed early, rather than late. Once my AI is up and operational others can take or tweak my code and apply to other mods.

Thank you Kyrub for all your past contributions. It is hard to comprehend that you are the only capable and willing person around to make progress for Catnip. I think other people would have been able to contribute with only a minimal help from you. Perhaps a document of how to edit files and what to do would be the greatest contribution for Catnip, but helping VM would be even better. What we do not need is more disagreement and more contradicting mod ideas.

[Catwalk]

Sorry Catwalk, but none of your ideas have seen any sunshine so far, although you proposed implementations to be realized by December 2010.

We had a ready first version of Catnip before the owner pulled the plug on the Dragonsword site, and I managed to establish two active discussion forums for MoM. I don't see the need for animosity on this matter. This is an open discussion forum, I merely posted an opinion on a small matter. If VM is not interested in any ideas at this point, I'm sure he'll post as much himself.

As for group efforts, the problem with Catnip was that I solicited too much committed help which meant that a lot of time had to be spent agreeing. And it later turned out that there were significant differences of opinion on fundamental matters that made cooperation difficult. I still intend on finishing Catnip, the agreement between kyrub and myself has been all along that there was no rush. We've both been busy and interest has been dwindling a little, but it'll be finished.

As for the idea mentioned, it can easily be argued that ladder buying is simply an oversight by the developers. They intended for progressive costs to be a factor, and ladder buying bypasses that entirely. And to my knowledge, the AI doesn't ladder buy at all in v1.31. It would seem that from an AI perspective, removing ladder buying is by far the easier option.

[VM]

Hi!

I appresciate all input. Catwalks success or failure on other projects does in no way influence my opinion on his opinion. It is welcome, as is anyones.

I think Ill handle this issue by the old and proven technique of postponing it. For now all costs are 4 gold per production. Ill handle this issue when we have some progress.

The plan is this:

-unit config files
-building config files
-production items based on those two
-city screen
-the ability to switch between farmers/workers
-the ability to switch production items
-refining main screen (gold/mana/food display, stack display, endturn/unit button switch)
-config file editor

Once these are complete, Ill look into combat.

One thing I have trouble deciding on is special abilities. I`m unsure wether those should be hard coded or configurable. Im partial to make them configurable, but that presents some design issues.

The system that I have now is the following: some queries into the gamestate cause events to trigger. Stuff like special abilities or enchantments can subscribe to events, and add their effect. Once all effects have been added, there is a resolutin phase where the effects will be applied.

For instance: we got food production on a city
the city will calculate farmer number, and multiply with food production rate based on the race. This is the base value.
The getFood event is triggered. Lets assume the city has access to wild game and famine cast on it. The wild game will add a +2 effect to the event argument. The famine adds an eliminate effect to the event agument. Once all effects are added, the resolution phase will set food production to 0 (as famine takes precedence).

The problem is to describe all special abilities in this context.
+1 to hit is easy, we add the subscription, then add 1 to the value requested.
but things like fire immunity or negate first strike pose a problem. I have an idea how I will implement these, but to make them configurable...

The third option is to hardcode some of the special abilities, and make the others configable. Im not sure if I like this one.


Any input? Let me reiterate that everyones opinion is welcome. Thanks.

[haphazard1]

Looks like an interesting project, VM!

I looked at your (new) Design Plan and some of the source at SourceForge, and it looks like you have a good idea of where you want to go. I am curious on how much effort you have spent to get to the current point, if you don't mind my asking of course.

I am mostly a C and Java guy myself, some C++ a number of years back (long since rusted away to near uselessness), so I am probably missing some nuances of the C# aspects. But one thing caught me eye in ProductionItem.cs:

33 public static ProductionItem Housing = new Housing() { Name = "Housing", Cost = 0 };
34 public static ProductionItem TradeGoods = new ProductionItem() { Name = "Trade goods", Cost = 0 };

Should the second line be "= new TradeGoods()" etc. rather than new ProductionItem(), to match the way Housing is handled? Or am I totally off base here?

Not trying to nitpick, just trying to understand. Keep up the good work!

[Gustaran]

I just would like to add a general thought:

95% of the time projects like these fail because the leader has no clue about project management. People are enthusiastic and with a lot of technical skill in their respective area but start a project without any sort of organization and in the end the project goes belly up.

If I could give only one advise: Spend a few hours on reading how to manage a project. It will save you a lot of headaches later. One of the most important points would be a well structured documentation of your goals, plans, project structure, resources, needs and an approximate timeline with projected milestones.

I am sorry to say this but a look at the other topic "Coding Plan", does not exactly inspire confidence in this area. I am not trying to be negative about the project, it would be great to see it succeed, but I wanted at least mention it.

[VM]

I am curious on how much effort you have spent to get to the current point, if you don't mind my asking of course.

Actual typing, about 8 hours. Thinking about it, now thats really hard to say. Closer to a 100 hours or so

Should the second line be "= new TradeGoods()" etc. rather than new ProductionItem(), to match the way Housing is handled? Or am I totally off base here?

No, youre spot on. This part is placeholder code, as I dont have a TradeGoods class yet Ill probably refactor that code later on, as I dont like how housing and trade goods dont fit into the productionItem scheme. I need to think about this some more.

Gustaran, you are of course right. I really should look into project management.
I am partial to an agile approach. It lends itself nicely to a no-time-commitment style of development, while still keeping the focus of it on target. In this spirit, my coding plan would be User Stories on features.

To say something positive, the "coding plan" topic is perhaps a litle misnamed. What I relly intended it to be is to give people a starting point to share their opinions or topics, so I listed the topics and some areas where some decisions are still needed.