Comprehensive Animals Modeling

[Richard Bruns]

LGJ: Yes, dogs can be mounts. They are a seperate category, so they can be whatever we code them to be.

I don't think we should model lots of discrete breeds. That would be a mess. The quality scale would work fine; if someone killed all the good horses and dropped the quality by 30%, then it would take a long time to recover. If you traded for good horses, the quality level would quickly rise to that level. I think the quality scale can do whatever the breeds can, because the quality is basically a way to model and average lots of diffrent breeds.

The "Genetic Adaptability" variable could be a good addition to the crops and animals attributes. Sorry I didn't see it when you posted it earlier.

F_Smith: Yes, I see how you could do something like that if you were clever with the code. But I think we should keep things simple for the main game. Most people won't want to mess with a lot of detail. If we later manage to hide these animals so teh player doesn't have to interact with them, we could think about adding more complexity. But for now there is no reason to go overboard with the detail. We can use these four categories for now, and see about adding more stuff later.

[F_Smith]

Richard:

'Clever with the code'?

No, that's standard OO programming. The game *will* be coded that way, in every 'component'.

For example, we have a bunch of 'TurnHandler' classes ('GovtTurnHandler', 'EGTurnHandler', 'CivTurnHandler') that implement a 'TurnHandler' interface with the method 'oneYear()'. So doing 'turn' logic is extremely clean and easy.

But agreed -- we can stick with 4 'subclasses' for now, and add more later. That's fine.

[roquijad]

I like your last list of animals, Richard, with the exception of dogs. LGJ has given a lot of good arguments to consider dogs, but I don't see why they can't be included abstractly in "production animals". The importance of dogs is simply that they are VERY useful for a lot of human tasks, but that doesn't imply individual modeling. The only animal that's important enough to be modeled individually is the horse.

Can we code all animals as abstractions and allow particular animals to be instances (in OO terms) of animal classes? That way we'd have:
Mount
Production
Food

where "horses" would be an instance of Mount and "dogs" would be an instance of Production. Players can decide if they want the dogs explicitly or if they want not just horses but also elephants and camels as mounts. A player could also choose to work only with the three abstractions. This is maybe the way to leave everybody happy.

[Richard Bruns]

Sure, we can have those three infraclasses of animal. They define the jobs animals do, and specific animals could be modeled if someone chooses to add that detail. It might be possible for animals to be part of multiple infraclasses, so dogs could have production and mount functions, depending on the circumstances. Also, some production animals could be mounts if you don't have horses.

But this discussion should be put on hold. It really isn't relevant considering the current state of the clash project. I say that we let this thread drift down for now, and then revive it when all the basic models are fully coded.

[roquijad]

OK