Re: [Rails-users] 1853

[brett l. <bre...@gm...>]

Oliver -

At a high level, there is interest in adding all 18xx games to Rails.
However, in the more near term, we have not yet had much discussion
about 1853. What the next supported game is going to be is currently
an open question.

I'll provide a bit more detail on the process for adding a new game.
This should help with understanding what it takes to add a new game.

We rely very heavily on the time and interest of volunteers. So, as
you can imagine, the choice of which games to implement next depends a
lot on someone stepping up to do the work. We're always looking for
more people who are interested in helping improve Rails in both big
and small ways.

Adding a new game can be broken up into a few pieces, some of which
don't require much programming experience.

1. Create Game-specific XML files. The map, tileset, and other XML
files define what components make up the game and what special or
optional rules are available. These are created mostly by hand, and
only require some familiarity with markup languages, but don't
particularly require programming experience.

2. Create any new Tile graphics. This isn't always required. We have a
pretty good library of tile graphics already created, but occasionally
a game will add some new tiles that we don't have. This requires the
use of Marco Rocci's Tile Designer and a few post-processing steps,
but no real programming experience is needed.

3. Identify rules differences and specialty rules that aren't yet
implemented. Here's where the bulk of the programming work begins. If
the game uses rules that are from games that we have already
implemented, the programming effort is usually pretty minimal (e.g.
18Kaas is 1830 on a different map. Adding support for it only required
the game XML and little else). Depending on the size of this work,
adding support for 1853 may be trivial, or it might be several hours
of work, which is likely to be spread over several weeks or months
depending on how much time someone has available to dedicate to the
effort.

4. Integration with other features.  Now that we have support for
route calculation and other features, there may be additional work
required to support those features within the new game.


---Brett.



On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 12:27 PM, Justin Rebelo <jus...@gm...> wrote:
> You're our first volunteer!
>
> On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 11:21 AM, Oliver Heck <oli...@ok...> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> are there any plans implementing 1853?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Oliver
>>
>>
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