Every couple of years question about default ruleset overhaul comes up. It has been always rather static, not really taking much advantage of new capabilities we add to the engine. Your average user who is only using what gets started by default (default ruleset) sees freeciv to evolve really slowly.
Latest idea/attempt to change this was addition of experimental ruleset. It was meant to later become new default ruleset. I don't think it has been, or is likely to be, very successful on that goal. It's just compilation of features not available in default ruleset. True to its name, it gets new experimental features instead of existing features stabilizing to something that could be used as default. I'm yet to run single experimental ruleset autogame in S2_4 without errors. Having experimental ruleset as playground for new features is nice, but thta's not something that will turn in to default ruleset in itself. I also suspect that just taking some individual features from experimental to default would not work too well. Rules balance each other, so they are not really independent. This is especially true with default ruleset that should be best balanced one. I'd rather have (new) ruleset that is designed with all the requirements of good default ruleset in mind. Those of us who want to use wall the whistles of freeciv engine can have their own ruleset (or use experimental ruleset). Default ruleset should be designed for balanced and fun gameplay. One techical side of that is simply not to use excessively "experimental" freeciv features, but only those which already work well (including AI's ability to cope with those rules). Drastic change in default ruleset is certain to cause uproar on some users who prefer current rules. Abandoning current rules simply isn't an option (at least not before we get some feedback from users). While default ruleset may change, current rules should still be available as separate ruleset. 1) Rename current default ruleset. While it's current role is to work as default ruleset, it should have distinct name. Just like our default tileset is nowadays named "Amplio2", and default ai module "classic". Name "classic" is actually what I'm going to propose for ruleset name too. That's the name we've always used when storing "original" default under name that should indicate that it's what we used to have. I'm for doing this soon. In freeciv codebase it's minor change, and doing it this early in 2.5 cycle would leave as more time to adjust everything (documentation at least) to match. 2) Add new ruleset. This can happen only when we have such an ruleset. Of the existing rulesets I'm looking through and testing tirolalira's civ2-3 ruleset to decide if it's something I could propose as something to add as new default ruleset. Anyway, we take this step when we have sucah an ruleset selected (but as ruleset doesn't need to be completely ready in this step, I think we can have something relativey soon) 3) Playtest new ruleset a lot. 4) Make new ruleset default one. This happens when new ruleset is ready for this. I'm uncertain if we should have one release cycle between 2 & 4 in any case, so that we would get feedback about new ruleset from more casual users before making it default one. This depends a bit on how drastically different rules from current ones we actually end up with. - ML _______________________________________________ Freeciv-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/freeciv-dev
