Re: [Rails-devel] 18xx Rails: Feature Request 1517702 - automatic route calculation

[Chris S. <chr...@gm...>]

Run calculation algorithms were discussed at length on the 18xx YahooGroup
mailing list recently. It's not a simple problem, but you are correct that
it is not insurmountable.

That said, many people feel such as myself feel there are LOTS of reasons to
use the computer instead of a physical board. In particular, it's fairly
difficult to use a physical board when I'm playing a game with someone in in
Chicago and another player in Ohio, considering that I live in Oregon.
However, thanks to rails, I am now playing exactly that game by email.  For
play-by-email, Rails has many advantages over the traditional
Vassal/CyberBoard/spreadsheet/human-moderator solutions.  Rules enforcement,
good text logging, automatic funds distribution, turn-order tracking... the
list of benefits Rails provides goes on and on and on...

As on any open source software project, the developers put their time where
they feel the most interest or need.  Clearly, the developers are focusing
on adding new games, supporting pbem, and some usability enhancements at the
moment.  Since they are volunteers, we have an interest in them spending
their time on things that interest them, otherwise they will burn out and
depart.

As was noted, more developers are welcome.  I personally don't have the
skill or time (though I might get it together to put together some xml files
for a few new games) but I very much appreciate the work of those who do.

--
Chris

Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.


On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 2:18 AM, Frederick Weld <
fre...@go...> wrote:

> Hi developers,
>
> I was wondering why this feature is prioritized so low. For me, this would
> be THE reason to use the computer instead of a physical board.
>
> Is it that you need a good algorithm before implementing this? In such a
> case, please consider the following:
> (1) Even though the brute force algorithm wouldn't be in O(n^p), it will
> probably be ok for non-diesel runs.
> (2) What SimTex's 1830 (most probably) does: A separate model (multi-edge
> graph) for route calculation is updated whenever someone lays a tile. By
> doing this, you get a very low constant factor of the time the algorithm
> needs, meaning you'll still have exponential time but you won't perceive
> this until the size of the graph becomes very large.
>
> What do you think about that?
>
> Best Regards,
> Frederick
>
>
>
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