RE: [Rails-devel] Train ownership limits

[John A. T. <ja...@ja...>]

On Fri, 14 Oct 2005, Erik Vos wrote:

> Yes, we will have to do the more special stuff in Java classes.
> We already have two special classes to handle the 1830-style
> and the 1835-style opening rounds.
> 
> Game-special classes will certainly be needed for 18US, 
> but IMO the 1826-style minor/major company conversion is now 
> common enough that a generic implementation looks worth while. 
> Probably by creating a special PublicCompany subclass (the company class
> name must already be specified in the <CompanyType> XML tag).

If you don't want to have phase/company transitions implemented in Java in 
general (and certainly there could be one or two "standard" 
implementations which use some XML data structure to drive their work), 
then I think you will have to go with a full state machine that can update 
attributes in arbitrary objects as it transitions to states.

> As Brett already mentioned: we are focussing on 1830, while
> keeping an open eye on other games. But we don't try to solve 
> everything in this stage.

I understand the desire to get something working quickly.  However, it 
seems likely to result in having to rewrite large sections later to 
accomodate game mechanics we already know about today, even ignoring 
future games that may introduce new concepts.

Nick Wedd's rule difference list provides a single source that covers most 
of the different behaviors that need to be implemented.  I strongly 
suggest coming up with a way to handle everything listed there in the 
architecture besides just leaving it for future recoding.

-- 
John A. Tamplin					ja...@ja...
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