RE: [Rails-devel] Various comments

[Erik V. <eri...@hc...>]

Iain,

> General comment:
> 
> Has anyone read the 18xx-softdev archive yet? A lot of good 
> ground was covered there (not all by me ;-)), and I think the 
> discussions here would benefit from using this as a base. 
> Specifically look at the thread(s) on a game definition file.

Just looked again, but it is hard so sort out the few pearls from that mess.

The thing I see so far is your data model in message #127, which we
indeed would do well to keep handy (I'll print it out).

Marco Rocci's summary of the 1830 private auction process in message #478
might also be useful.

Any other messages you find worth revisiting?


There is one interesting idea that I would add, inspired on message #238
from Gregor Zeitlinger: creating subclasses for game-specific processes.

The question is to what extent we can configure options in a config file.
At some point things might get so complicated or game-specific that we
need to write special code. 
The idea is to do that in game-specific subclasses of generic classes
which handle the more common cases.

A strong example is the Ferdinandea Secession in 1841, which I don't think
we can make configurable - we will need game-specific code for that.

This would mean, that class names should be configurable too: 
an 1841 game definition file might contain a definition like
"PhaseChangeClass=PhaseChange1841" (or the equivalent in XML), assuming that
we have a generic (default) class
named PhaseChange. Such classes should be instantiated by a class factory.