[freeciv-data] Re: Lord of the Rings

On 2002.05.01 00:51:04 -0600 Per I. Mathisen wrote:

> There was lots of discussions about modpacking a year ago. Please tell
> me what you have in mind here.

The two main things that I would like to see first are:

1) Flexible calendaring, allowing a modpack to specify arbitrary start 
and end dates, plus arbitrary specification of "epochs" (where an 
"epoch" is a range of turns that increment the date by a specified 
number of years).

2) A lock-out mechanism that will allow a modpack to limit technologies 
to certain sides (e.g., so you could keeps Dwarven kingdoms from 
researching Elvish technology that would let them build Elvish 
Archers).  This could be implemented in various ways, depending on how 
complex you wanted it to be.


I'll be happy to write more about either of these, but let's see what 
other basic ideas come up before we get too bogged down discussing the 
details of any of them.  It may be that other people have suggestions 
that should be addressed before mine are.  If we get a wish list and 
someone indicates that they would like to implement something on the 
list, then we should discuss that something in more detail.  (Maybe 
even set up an RFC system?)

Thanks,
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas

p.s. - It might also be worth thinking about the relationship of 
scenarios and modpacks.  IMO we will ultimately want a system where we 
can publish scenarios that inherit the general properties of some 
specific modpack and then specify some more information to add to or 
override what the modpack specifies.  Even if we don't want to start 
implementing such a system now, it might be nice to keep it in mind 
while designing enhanced modpack support, to lay a good foundation for 
future work on modpack-dependent scenarios.