Re: [Rails-devel] Tile orientation display

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

On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 1:57 PM, Erik Vos <eri...@xs...> wrote:

> The currently ongoing discussion in the [18xx] group on how to describe
> tile
> lays is also of interest for Rails.  I'm in particular referring to cases
> where the Rails (TileDesigner) tile orientation (i.e., the tile number
> placement)  is different from the physical game. I just checked 1830 and
> 1856. The 1830 tile orientations are the same as in Rails (except tile
> #65),
> whereas with 1856 there are many differences.
>
> Take tile #23 as an example. The 1856 orientation of this tile is
> upside-down as compared with 1830 and Rails.  Now assume tile #9 has been
> laid before on hex O10 (connecting SW-NE) and is upgraded to tile #23
> (adding a connection NW-NE).  Now the question is: how to display this
> upgrade in the map window and the game report?
>
> The Rails tile has the number as in 1830, on the SW side in this case, so
> the upgrade is now coded as #23/O10/SW.  However, the physical tile would
> have its number on the NE side, so in an FTF game the upgrade would be
> denoted as #23/O10/NE.
>
> My question is: what do we prefer?
>
> I am thinking on adding an optional attribute to <Tile> in TileSet.xml that
> specifies the 'base rotation' of the physical tile as compared with the
> Rails tile (or vice versa). This 'base rotation' would then be added (or
> subtracted) to the internal value to calculate the displayed tile
> orientation.
>
> So, to make the laid tile in this example be described as #23/O10/NE we
> should add an attribute like 'baseRotation="3"'.
>
> Any need for this feature? Should it  be an option?
>

Some games are not even consistent within that game (I don't remember which
ones, but there was a discussion on the 18xx group many years ago) -- the
same tile number can have the tile number in two different positions --
either KT or ST should be able to talk about it since they both run lots of
PBeM games.  However, that is hard to deal with anyway, since you have to
know which one of the different ones was played.

If you really want to support different orientations per game, I suggest
simply having the per-game tile manifest will provide a rotation for the
tile number only (or equivalently everything but the tile number), so it can
be made to match the tiles supplied in the game.  If the rotation isn't
supplied, the game uses the orientation in the master tile database.

-- 
John A. Tamplin