[Explorer-devel] New Tools development

[Michael <mi...@be...>]

Following the huge effot in terms of time required to finish Pulsar I've 
finally decided it's time to do some work and have started on a set of 
tools, to make explorer empires a bit easier to run and manage.  I 
hope eventually to offer similar functionality to GalaxyChart, but am 
some way of that yet.

The first tool will be a turn reader, designed to expose an explorer 
turn through a familiar document object model (DOM) regardless of 
it's source, e.g. text, XML or database.  This will then form the basis 
of an IO engine for any viewer - and allow interchange between 
these data sources.  Most sections of the report are fairly easy to 
decide upon an interface for and the XML spec provides a good 
guideline, however planets/worlds provide me with a few headaches.

Should worlds be represended in a class heirarchy...

e.g.

WorldBase -> UnknownWorld
                  -> ScoutedWorld -> Asteroid
                                               -> OwnedWorld

in which properties like size, resources and stockpile levels are only 
introduced when they are known, or should there be a single 
"uberworld" class in which unknown properties are flagged with a 
suitable value (e.g. size = -1).  As best I can understand GalaxyChart 
goes for the latter aproach - is it the best one or just the simplest?  
Any OO guru's out there with any opinions?

-Michael