Hubert Kowalewski writes: > BTW, I'm gonna be a wet towel for everyone submitting new nations, but > don't you think that the process of adding new nations is a bit out of > control? [...]
Whew, I unleashed something here. Jos has found this discussion, but it ought to have been on -dev as well as -i18n, so that other nation contributors have a chance to join in. I think there's two things here: whether all these nations are enhancing the game and belong in the core Freeciv distribution at all (ignoring for a moment the impact on translators), and if so, how to help players navigate them, and then there's managing the impact on the translation team specifically. Personally, I'm quite fond of our nation collection; I think it's pretty cool that there exists this growing GPL'd set of nation descriptions, with flags, cities, leaders, relationships (civil_war, conflicts_with) and potted histories (from which I've learnt some stuff), of consistent quality, all curated by a qualified historian. I accept that's not necessarily a reason that it has to live in the core of Freeciv, though. I think this is a well-curated set, without duplication as some have suggested; it's not a free-for-all where nationsets from random contributors are incorporated without much thought. Much of the recent work has been by one or two people, and you can see from discussion in the patch tickets that care goes into the process. I think most untidiness has to be blamed on the vagaries of human history :) With regard to addition policy, there's a fairly detailed policy at <http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/Nations#Nations_Mini-FAQ>. I suspect that Jos & co also apply additional criteria. I'm definitely not for permanently throwing away the hard work of Jos, Andrzej et al, by deleting nations outright, chopping down legends etc. At most, IMO, some of the existing content gets moved into some kind of expansion pack which there's no obligation to translate, but whose continued existence is otherwise accommodated. I agree that the current nation selection dialog is a bit overwhelming; in the Gtk client, every nation group other than Oceanian and Imaginary has a massive scrollbar even in full-screen. Some half-baked ideas to make it more manageable: * More, finer-grained nation groups, and maybe subgroups ("Europe/Baltic"). This would also help automatic nation selection; if I select some Baltic duchy, it'd be kind of cool if the game is specific enough to throw six other Baltic duchy AIs into the game with me. Requires re-classifying existing nations, and for period-based grouping, probably some scholarly discussion and compromise (see "Early Modern" discussion in <http://gna.org/patch/?1698> et al). * More sophisticated UI for selecting nation groups. Being able to filter on the intersection of Ancient AND African, for example, to get down to a manageable list to browse. Don't really know how to make this intuitive (I'd try Ctrl-clicking on the nation group tabs to select more than one, but it's not very discoverable). * Make more use of the interrelationships embedded in the nations. I think there's probably some rich information in civilwar_nations, which the player doesn't get to see much of. (One thing I want to do but probably will never get round to is to put those relationships in Graphviz or something and see what the result looks like.) * Geographic selection: pick nations from a world map. Maybe augmented with a time period slider as well. (Maybe even start with the computer's current physical location, if there's a technically easy way of getting that.) Everyone wants to play their local nation, maybe they can learn something of the history of their area while they're at it :) Would require backfilling all existing nations with approximate coordinates and dates (where possible), and noticeable coding work. If we are to be ruthless and somehow divide the nations into "core" and "extended" ones, well, I have no idea where to start :) I'd want to leave that up to Jos & co, if they are willing. There are a couple of technical issues. One is that some civilwar/ conflicts relationships will likely cross the boundary (so that a "core" nation refers to an "extended" one), and the game complains (mildly) about references to non-existent nations, and we use it to check for errors in nation files. If the "extended" nations are a modpack, we want them to coexist nicely with the "core" nations, so that when the extended nations are installed, a "major" nation can still spin off a "minor" one by civil war. That could be done by having the modpack replace the "core" nations as well, or by the same team maintaining both sets in sync. I'm sure these are quite soluble, possibly with minor code changes. There's also the option I mentioned before, of keeping the nations where they are, but reducing the sense of obligation translators have to translate all the material. It would be easy enough to split out all nation material from everything else and present two pot-files, and document that translation of the nations.pot is strictly optional, to encourage new locales. (It would be possible to generate sans-nation stats even without doing this, if that would help.) But I can imagine translators not feeling their work is done if *no* nation words are translated, because nation words pop up in the game. Which would suggest we do need the "core"/"extended" split. On some of the other topics that have come up: re incompleteness/imbalance: I wouldn't judge by the current snapshot of nations, since there's been a continuous flow of them for years. Jos can probably comment further, but <http://gna.org/patch/?2010> suggests that they're approaching it continent-by-continent, so some areas are going to be fatter than others while that's going on. re in-game confusion caused by Poles vs Greater Poles etc: conflicts_with already exists and is maintained to discourage nations with confusingly similar names or flags from appearing in the same game. I checked a couple of the examples listed as confusingly similar, and they are marked as conflicting. re links to Wikipedia: These will probably rot due to wiki notability fads over the years, and need maintenance :( re max players: IIRC, the freeciv.fi people ran a game with the current maximum number of players, 126. (In general, I do think we need to look at some of the issues our already expanded limits have brought to light before expanding further -- although while city radius is a current issue and map size has been, I'm not aware of number of players causing the code to blow a gasket.) re "imaginary" nations: These are popular. I agree with Daniel; I don't think we should get rid of them. _______________________________________________ Freeciv-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/freeciv-dev
