Re: [Rails-devel] Game Options

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

> > OK, I'll try to change it that way one of these days.

In fact I have started today.

> > First the functionality, then the beautification.
> 
> 
> Hmmm...  I just took a deeper look at this. I now have a better
> understanding of why you took this approach.
> 
> It looks like we've got some pretty fundamental design flaws in our
> initialization code.
> 
> It seems that in order to get the variant options, we need to 
> parse the
> game XML. We don't parse the game XML until we start a new game.
> 
> We really don't want to start a new game just to read which variants
> exist, if any.
> 
> So, it appears that we may need to refactor our initialization code a
> bit, or create a new interface to loading the XML properties.

In any case, part of the code in Options should move to GameUIManager.
But that can be done after we have found a good concept. Let's do that
first.

> I think we might be able to get away with just creating an array of
> ComponentManagers, and read all of the Game.xmls on startup. 
> This should
> give us all of the information we need to present the inital game
> information and game variant options. 

Yes, I was thinking along the same lines. 
My suggestion is to split Game.xml into a smaller Game.xml 
that only has the startup options, and a Components.xml
that contains all the rest. Only Game.xml is needed to
find out about variants and such.

> This would also allow us to add a property to define the number of
> minimum and maximum players, and have the Options() dialog dynamically
> add or subtract name boxes based on this data.

In that case, the game selection should precede player entry.

> Then, when the New Game button is clicked, we can just choose 
> the proper
> ComponentManager from the array, and discard the rest.

In my proposal: then start loading Components.xml.

Erik.