developer-friendly C-evo source

[vasya]

Hi all !

I recently made a variation of C-evo that is easy to work with. Modifications I made, quoting from the README:

* This project is developer-friendly, absolute paths were cleaned up and
a step-by-step instruction on how to compile from source was added.

* Development is happening in "git".
We want public bug reports, public MergeRequests/PullRequests, public forks.

* Pull requests for better Linux support will always be gladly accepted.
I fixed a bug with unit movement in `wine` as a starting point.
The game fully works in wine from now on (this was the only bug known)!

* You can of course see all the technical differences using git.
Look for commits diverging from the official version (steffen-gerlach git branch).

[vasya]

Damn, forgot to mention the repo itself. https://gitlab.com/vn971/cevo/tree/delphi

[Dirk]

Interesting. Is the idea to change the game itself?

[vasya]

That's a good question. Here's my attitude:

* I'm making my changes mergeable to Steffen code base. Ideally, I would love to see it merged.
A careful reader might notice that this goes a bit against Steffen-s general direction of development being centralized. At the same time, some distributed development tools simply did not exist back there at 1999. So maybe it's OK to introduce a git-based version now.

* I do not want big game changes because it takes a very good game designer to do it correctly.
Not every rule is a good one. Steffen proved to be a good person to design that. I would rather make "propositions" for rules, like I did with cost-based experience. These can be merged or NOT merged.


And finally another proposition that I planned:

* auto-patrolling territories with railroad. Currently, you may have a city with a couple of adjacent railroads. But each turn an enemy may move closer to your city. You may want to check that, move your unit to the edge of the railroad and see what's there in the fog of war. Bu-u-ut, that's micro-management again. A VERY boring one. So, how can we fight that?
1. We may have an auto-patrol feature for units, but this is hard to maintain.
2. We may do auto-patrolling for countries that have Shinkansen Express.
3. We may just give auto-patrolling for all countries and their railroads for free. Just accept the fact that railroad gives observation -- and that's all.

This is a game rules proposition currently, no implementation "attached"...

Thoughts?...

[Alvage]

I do use patrolling quite often, but usually it's not by RR. It is useful to patrol around a boundary, from a high terrain stack-defended tile, with a fast attack unit jumping out and back in by road or easy terrain, while the defender stays fortified. Honestly, have no habit of keeping the troops inside a city, so the RR grid around them would be of no use for this purpose, - unless you have Shinkansen, of course. The only exception is patrolling with aircraft: it must land in a city or get lost. An AI can (and should) be programmed to do it, no doubt. As for an auto-patrol user macro... not sure if this is possible without an overly complex setup screen.

[vasya]

have no habit of keeping the troops inside a city, so the RR grid around them would be of no use for this purpose

Well, that depends on how you would like (or not like) this to have.. May we simply want free observation for all railroads inside your territory?

I made a bad thing about mixing the two topics BTW. I initially wanted this post to be about the "developer-friendly C-evo source"..

[Dirk]

i would like the game to be more accessible from the keyboard. Be able to scroll the map with the arrow keys for instance, use ESC and RETURN more etc. Move groups of units somehow. Ideally i would like the source to be in C# but i think that's way too ambitious. Vasya, which environment do you recommend to write Delphi in? I have no idea myself. Any free develop environment/compiler for this? I've seen the language itself is not too difficult. Finally, it might be a good idea to contact Steffen about this since changes that won't be merged won't go very far. I don't know if he's still involved in all this. Last time i contacted him was about the C# AI template, he fixed a nasty bug there and since then it's almost perfect.

[vasya]

Honestly, if you haven't developed in Delphi before, I suggest not to do it at all... It's very old, and very ugly I would say. I'll answer exact questions below.

> which environment do you recommend to write Delphi in?
There is no much choice really, it should be Windows and Delphi. I use Windows XP inside VirtualBox. The Delphi package I use is an 11 years old (!!!) package that I took from school while I graduated in 2004. I actually don't know whether it's legal, whether my serial key is acceptable for what I do. I know, shame on me for that..
As you see, I haven't really answered your question because I don't know any legal way to do this. Delphi7 is not sold by now. The current Delphi costs 200$ or more, and is incompatible.

Pascal sources themselves _could_ be developed with a free alternative -- project Lazarus. But the project does not seem to be compatible at first glance. Some changes may probably be done that I just don't know how to do.

I also make small source code changes from my own OS (Linux) and only do the compilation in Windows, in command line. Big changes are hard to do this way though.

> it might be a good idea to contact Steffen
He might be already aware of the topic because he's the owner of the site and forum. But I'll write him personally, too, thanks for the remark.)

[Cor'e =)]

Delphi libraries themselves do not seem to present bugs in the game (?), they seem solid even if they're old, but the source itself is where the issues arise, and only Steffen appears to fix them (centralized), would it be possible to actually wrap the Delphi libraries calls in a newer language? That way we could manage the actual code dynamics in let's say C++ or C# or even Java, but when needed call the the Delphi subs... then at some later point replace those Delphi sub calls with a preferred "modern" language that is just as effective as Delphi was/is at doing its part(s).

Regarding Lazarus, yes, i made some inquiries in the past and recently renewed such inquiries, there may be more compatibility now to convert the code, someone should look into this. =)

[vasya]

About mixing libraries - that's not a topic I'm really competent at, so I can't say anything..

Lazarus, at the same time, is very interesting to me. I see now you made some effort to do the porting in the past:
http://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/ind ... pic=7914.0
Do you have the source package from the user "skalogryz", where he says that "here's the first step. Lazarus compiles the project" ?

Since I already created a git-based repository for C-evo, I might as well put the Lazarus fork there. Better than losing this in time...