I've got design, you've got programming.

[Hulavuta]

The Error reports are rarely accurate. Many times it told me that I forgot a closing tag for some variable and forgot or event tag but all I did was forget a " mark.

[AzuSkyLigh]

^ That's very true. I once forgot a " mark for a unit's .cfg in a user-made faction, and the error report gave me a whole bunch of unrelated shiznit about other factions that had no relation to that unit I messed up.

[Dixie]

When your error reports start pointing out at mainline stuff, you oughta doubt them

Seriously though, those error reports are really a pain. And I haven,t ever succeded in reaching the stderr.txt to know of the real errors, since I'm on a mac. Why would the game point at weird stuff anyway?

Either way, sorry for being so very much off topic

[markm]

Aha, a designer! Awesome.

I have been having a bit of a hard time with design myself, and thus have gotten sidetracked into various scaffolding and infrastructure projects instead... along with spending a lot of time researching exactly what is already in existence.

The background is thus far just a small part of the GNUniverse / GNUverse: that consisting of Battle for Wesnoth, Freeciv, and Crossfire. (The graphical MUD / Rogue / Nethack type GNU game Crossfire, not the newfangled first person shooter commercial game.)

Freeciv hints at a few eras or periods of units, basically pre-metal, bronze, iron, and gunpowder. But so far I haven't even found much yet in existing Wesnoth units that would sketch a difference between bronze based and iron based units, and I only very recently discovered the gunpowder usage by humans in the Fate of a Princess campaign, which looks like it should be able to provide at least a good start toward dragoons and cannon.

There is a basic design problem in the scoring too, in that Wesnoth conflates tabletop game balance type points with currency or resources, whereas maybe it would be better to score each unit separately on those matters, so those who are looking to balance scenarios can do so while those who prefer technology to allow accomplishing more with less can also do so.

So hey, design, yeah, cool. Got any designs for pre-metal, bronze, iron, and gunpowder eras?

Edit: maybe I should write periods or ages or stages instead of eras, since era is used as a technical term in Wesnoth...

-MarkM-

[Zedreth]

What exactly are you looking for?

[markm]

Ultimately I would like to be able to generate Wesnoth scanarios, or even campaigns, by means of scripts that parse Freeciv savegame files.

I aim to have Freeciv "turns" take about a week or a month or so, based on typical MUD (and, it seems also Crossfire) time running at about two hours per game day thus about one real month per game year.

So each month or so Freeciv-scale units might have moved, resulting in a different combination of adventure possibilities for players operating at the Wesnoth scale or the Crossfire scale.

So for example if one civilisation has a unit of warriors on one Freeciv-scale (about 100 to 200 or so miles or kilometers across) "tile", and another civilisation has a phalanx unit nearby, that is a situation that will be taking about a month real time to change. During that month, players within the first civ should be able to use recruit lists corresponding to "warriors" (pre-bronze chaps, pointy sticks, maybe stone axes, stuff like that... maybe thugs and maybe even footpads since Freeciv doesn't treat sling as a tech even though archery does require a specific tech). Players in the second civ should be able to use recruit lists corresponding to a phalanx: bronze stuff, spears, breastplates, greaves, shields, that kind of stuff.

Since Wesnoth campaigns are used to tell stories that fit into history rather than being used to make changes in history, it can initially be assumed that it will be Freeciv players that will actually be steering the course of history. But hopefully that can change at some point. For example maybe some kind of verification or something could be used to guess whether a Wesnoth replay file of a solution to a scenario or campaign is legitimate, not created by cheating; then scenarios could be generated from two or more points of view and the first solution submitted in time for the deadline would be taken as history. Or maybe players would have to agree lets play this battle in multiplayer mode live with each other and take the result as history.

But initially it'd just be stuff like here is a map of the terrain your phalanx is occupying, along with the recruit list that you as an officer of whatever level within that phalanx get to use in your capacity as paymaster doling out "gold" (local currency, food, supplies, loot, whatever, we use the term "gold" as an abstraction of all that kind of reward/pay/supplies logistics) to the troops.

If the tile you occupy / your zone of control is adjacent to an enemy unit or an enemy zone of control (or even allied, you know troops sometimes can get rowdy...) there ought to be potential for encounters in the process of putting into effect the "zone of control" your Freeciv-scale unit exerts on the Freeciv scale...

-MarkM-

[Zedreth]

http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=30017 Heres my era design. BTW I found someone for art and programming lol. But feel free to jump on the bandwagon.

[markm]

So far in the thread you pointed at it isn't clear which faction corresponds to which level of technology.

Are the aliens spacefaring aliens?

Do the enslaved humans know how to work bronze? Iron? Clay, even? ("Pottery" tech...)

What about the humans who stayed free... do they have more or less tech knowledge than the enslaved ones?

Etc...

-MarkM- ("knotwork"; Digitalis Data Services.)

[Zedreth]

Ask it on that other thread.