Dear Globulation 2 gurus, Here is something I forgot to include in my most recent big feedback message, but maybe that is good because perhaps it deserves a separate discussion.
It seems clear to me that it is desirable to be able to combine the features of flags and areas. On one hand, flags can be easily moved, can be used with the Tab key to quickly find them on the map, can summon a specified number of globules, can have their area quickly adjusted (by just changing their radius), and have other controls specific to their type (e.g., _what_ to clear for clearing flags and what level of warrior for war flags). On the other hand, areas allow indicating a precise set of cells on the map, and can (sometimes desirably) have a lower priority. It would be lovely to combine these, but what could the user interface look like? For areas, one most likely does not want to treat each cell of an area like a flag, where the options can (or must) be specified for each cell. At the same time, one does not necessarily want to add the idea of a region, because this would require implementation and a complicated user interface for specifying (user input) and indicating (output) which cells are in a region. What to do? My idea is to use flags to control areas. Any contiguous set of clearing cells would be automatically governed by a clearing flag whose circle contained or intersected with one of the cells. (I'm not using the word "area" in some of my discussion because it is ambiguous in English whether the word "area" refers to each single cell, or a collection of contiguous cells.) Similarly for a set of guard cells and war flags, except in this case I think it is important (especially for sudden unplanned battles) that it would be optional (with the default being the old behavior) for a war flag to govern guard cells. If a flag governed a bunch of cells, then those cells would _replace_ the area of the flag's circle as what it controls, and those cells would cease to function as ordinary clearing or guard cells. If two or more flags would govern a set of cells, then which flag a cell is governed by would be determined by looking for the smaller of the distance to the flag minus the radius of the flag. It would be important that the user interface clearly indicated which set of cells is governed by a flag (including in the case of the old behavior of governing a circle). At the same time, I think it would be good if clearing/war flags with zero requested workers would act like current clearing/guard areas. This means that workers would clear resources governed by such clearing flags if they happened to pass by (but only clearing the kinds of resources requested by the flag), and warriors would go to cells governed by such war flags, if they had nothing else to do (and were of the level required by the flag). A minor addition: It might be useful to allow moving a war flag to optionally move the set of cells it governs. This could allow things like "lines of battle" or help to make flanking attacks. Comments? Good idea or just stupid? -- Joe _______________________________________________ glob2-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/glob2-devel
