Jim Kingdon's Xconq to do list

This is a few of Jim Kingdon's notes (mostly for my own use). Most of the interesting xconq stuff is on the xconq page (e.g. mailing list archives).

General to do

• Fix -host and -join (this is high priority, as it should facilitate writing a network server type thingie which is easier than arranging network games by email and such).
• 8x8 Kuwaiti flag - middle stripe which should be white is transparent instead. OK for 16x16.
• After you find a submarine (e.g. from capturing a city), it will disappear when you move adjacent (or scroll). Look at cover_area_1 and newcov > oldcov and see_cell. see_cell rolls the dice. Should have a flag (in the view?) which gets set when the unit is seen (or when a dice roll fails? but having more eyes should increase chances I'd think), and set to pristine state when the unit is no longer being seen.
• infantry in bombers whose turn it is don't show the little twinkling box. Likewise armor in transports, many times.
• need more docstrings for GDL which get shown in the help. Things like

       Towns and cities always have foreign correspondents, telephones,
       private citizens coming and going, so their state is always
       going to be available to any side that knows they exist.
  or 
       This is not too realistic, but otherwise keeping tanks fueled
       is a major hassle.  This is supposed to be a game, not an
       exercise in logistics (play "empire.g" if you want that).
  or
       Note that armor does *not* have a base consumption;
       tanks that don't move don't need fuel.  (Infantry
       still needs fuel
  shouldn't be hidden in comments in the source.  (arguably...).
  

• Select a unit and type "?". Should give help for that unit type.
• Help screens for material should either display in-length, out-length, base-production, explicit production, base-consumption, &c, or should at least mention in which unit types this is covered.
• bug whereby aircraft who are flying over a city at the end of a turn get automatically resupplied.
• bug whereby if a base revolts, its occupants revolt rather than disappear. But apparently not a town or city.
• Better names for bases. Such as nameofisland-sequencenumber.
• When building base, on "click to decide where", "{" means "here". As useful as it is to have a way to say "here", this shouldn't be it...
• On "G", if you type a name it doesn't recognize, it takes that as independent. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
• "Save" dialog should default to what we loaded from.
• after game, be able to select a side to see unit distribution
• set advantage by production rate rather than #cities.
• What does ~/work/xconq/x11/xconq -f ~/work/xconq/lib/foo.g do? Seems to ignore the directory specified, and uses the installed version. Investigate.
• If a unit does not have enough ACP, "e" causes "nothing to enter" rather than "not enough ACP" message.
• Bug whereby a unit moved, we see it at its new position, but it does not disappear from its old (last known) position. Hitting "{" or "}" clears this condition, so we are allowed to know that the two units are the same and it isn't in the old position.
• What's the "x 5" stuff in "Build fighter, 5/7 x 5"? Something strange happened in one game to trigger it (roughly 23 Apr 2002), but then it went back to normal in my next game.
• advance_into_cell has one rather strange line: "net_prep_enter_action(unit, other, unit);" - this means that we are scheduling an action for "other" to enter next turn (or something like that). There should be a way for this to show up in the user interface. I also don't understand the code, do_enter_action sort of looks like we would charge the transport (rather than the embarking unit) for the ACPs but I don't believe that actually happens.
• "2" "P" (click on unit from list). The "2" doesn't get cleared; if you then type "3" then the count for the next thing is "23".

standard.g

there is no intrinsic reason to limit advantage to 5; this was more motivated by country size, which is small so as to make quick games work better. Bump up the country size so cities won't get all crammed together, then set the advantage limit to 15 - that ought to be pretty challenging! I think that this should also be done on a larger board with a larger country-separation-min (well, if we need to in order to make it fit, there is the problem that the AI doesn't coordinate task groups and this would hurt more on a larger board).

empire.g

• In help for "mines", it should omit material handling upon move, since the flag is set which says that the unit doesn't move.
• cannot build troop transports (and anything else with duplicate characters). The easy fix is just to document using the mouse.
• Do something about strangenesses in "A" (most notably, the engineers unit seems to need to have both ACP free and if not, nothing explains what was wrong). Better error handling if nothing else.
• cannot save and restore a game
• cannot start up AI player
• Fix obvious problems in empire.g: most aircraft types are identical, radar cannot be produced, transport aircraft can't transport anything, lcm/hcm factories and some other important things are commented out, how can one produce civilians (other than at capital)?
• Desired distribution of civilians is one per facility (run_economy doesn't treat the facilities as consumers and thus send them civilians although they need 1 civilian to produce (because of material-to-act)). Why do agribusiness even have a capacity for civilians? Should base-production need one civilian? Also, check that civilians *can* get sent out from capital (where produced) to warehouse (or agribus or whatever) through several steps, to destination (is there is bug whereby they often get stuck within capital's out-length or thereabouts?).
• "r" (resupply) doesn't seem to work for a recon-plane.

log.g

Really need to tackle the flakiness in building (lack of decent error messages).

If a road goes across a river, infantry cannot cross.

advances.g

In the tcl/tk research dialog, should show the cost of advances in the scrolling list. And at the top give the one-sentence summary as in "o research" output.

If all units have moved at end of turn, but advances left, should pop up the research dialog.

More on over-construction problem?

• Increasing construction costs has problems with the slow start to the game, and the AI being able to cope.
• Try #3 will be to set base-consumption of all units to 1 food, the in-length on movers to a positive value (9999?), and the out-length on cities to the same. Note no in-length on cities; don't want to share food and ore around. This is inspired by Stan's suggestion of how (pay)CivII does it (although it isn't quite the same).
• Idea #4 is the same as #3, but with a new material instead of food.
• Idea #5 is to limit growth of cities (but not so much in the very start of the game?)

future.g

docstrings don't make mp-to-enter-terrain for groundcar, hovercar.

Generic Game Design stuff

Should document the default for supply-on-creation. I think it defaults to zero.

Initial analysis done

• "i" in move mode skipping bombers with occupants. http://sources.redhat.com/ml/xconq7/2000/msg00365.html.