[Rails-devel] Generic Framework

[Stewart T. <wsr...@ho...>]

Brett, et al,

I agree that building a generic framework for 18xx games is an essential 
foundation, however, I think that focusing on just a single game like 1830 
is risky. Particularly because 1830 is more straightforward than many games, 
the danger is of making design decisions in the basic model that makes it 
more difficult to extend to accomodate richer feature sets.

From a game specific rules set, it is generally easier to disable 
functionality than it is to introduce whole new capabilities. For example, 
many 18xx titles have major, minor and private companies, not just the major 
and private of 1830. 1837 has 4 types of company with "coal" companies as 
well. Some titles allow minor companies to merge. 1841 almost allows 
arbitrary company mergers. 1870 allows companies to buy their own stock. 
1837 and 1854 have hexagonal stock charts - the so called 2.5 dimensional 
stock chart. 1860 has a linear stock chart.

While it is more work to begin with, I think that we'd get a better 
framework with an object model designed to handle a richer feature set and 
then constrain it with rules for 1830. If we get the framework right and 
exploit polymorphic methods we can save a lot of work later on.

Another issue to be considered is "persistence". How are we going to save 
the game to disk? What persistence mechanism are we going to use? Java 
serialization? Record based flat files? Database? This also has an impact on 
the design of the generic framework.

Its impossible for me to describe my software development experience without 
sounding terribly boastful! But, I have considerable experience in designing 
large OO systems with Java as my preferred language of choice. I also have a 
large collection of 18xx titles! :-)

I've started sketching out a few thoughts in Visio. Can you read UML? If you 
are interested, I can design a domain object model for a generic framework?

I think that XML is a good way to go for the rule sets - and, I've got lots 
of experience with XML as well.... :-)  I've also written Swing applications 
- not really my idea of fun as I'm mainly a relational database guy. I 
started in the software business in 1980, so I've had plenty of time to 
build lots of experience!

regards

Stewart