Re: [Rails-devel] Coalfields and states

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

Thanks, Stefan.

> A) Reading the rules carefully it seems that the rights are only required
for
> the revenue train run, not for tracing a route for tile and token laying.
Do all
> agree on this?

I would agree, but that's more because of the simplicity of interpreting the
rules this way than that I'm any sort of rules expert....
 
> B) Suprisingly (to me at least) SpecialRights has to no location field,
thus I had
> to hardcode the coalfield hex location. On the other hand I did not know
> what to do with fields rightValue and rightDefaultValue.

Ah, good point. 
I had created Rights as a map so it could be used for more complex cases,
but the value is currently unused and remains null.
Would it help to use the location name as the value of this right? Any other
ideas?

In addition: would it be useful to give this hex (or HexStation) a special
type once we have implemented that new concept?
Here we could reuse type "mine", because that's a pretty generic type that
occurs in several games.

> C) The finishConfiguration method of SpecialProperties for a
> (Public)Company were not called. I added the missing call to the
> finishConfiguration of PublicCompany. I have not checked if this call is
also
> missing for PrivateCompany and/or should be better moved up to the
> Company class.

OK, I'll have a look.  Yesterday I had the same problem with Phase.

finishConfiguration() is intended to be generic in all configurable classes,
but it's an afterthought and is so far only called where it is really used
(and apparently not even that!).
 
> D) Personally I am not too happy that the main code parts of Rights (which
in
> my view is not a very general part of 18xx) are  inside the main classes
> PublicCompany and OperatingRound, which are already difficult to
> understand and in my view have grown too large.

Well, right.  But otherwise specific OperatingRound_1830 and
PublicCompany_1830 classes would be needed to implement this feature, and I
found that a bit of overkill too.  But it's still an option. Would you have
preferred that approach?  The SpecialRight class would then also become
specific and be renamed to CoalfieldsRight or so.

I have no idea in what other games we could use Rights. As I have named it,
it's very generic and could perhaps be employed in currently unexpected
ways. But I must admit that I can't give any example, so maybe you're right.

> But breaking up the Round
> classes has been on my agenda for long and I know that Erik is not happy
> about that idea neither ;-)

That could be so because of my rusty brains, of course.  It's not so that I
would run away if you started doing such things.  But I think that it will
be (1) a hell of a lot of work, and (2) pretty dangerous.

Erik.