Re: variants for all games

[Lincoln Peters <peters2000 at mindspring dot com>]

On Tue, 2002-06-11 at 15:15, Hans Ronne wrote:
> The solution is probably to find the minimal set of variants that can (and
> should) be enabled in all games, and change the code in read.c accordingly.
> I would suggest that world-seen, see-all, sequential and a new variant
> ais-may-resign (which would set g_ai_may_resign) should be enabled
> everywhere. In contrast, people, supply and economy should be enabled only
> in games that support them. And world-size only in games without fixed maps
> (base modules). Not sure about real-time. It's currently enabled only in
> the panzer game.

What if Xconq offered certain variants like world-seen, see-all, and
sequential-play by default, but there was a way to specify in the game
module *not* to allow those variants?  That way you could leave the same
level of control to module authors, but make it so that the author
doesn't have to worry about every variant that the game should support
if he or she doesn't want to.

Under a system like this, a variant like "world-seen" or "see-all" could
be disabled using a mechanism like:

(variants
  (not world-seen)
  (not see-all)
)

The above example might be appropriate for Civ-type games like
"advances" (but not "colonizer") or exploration games like "magellan". 
And if a game designer wants to force anything to be enabled, it would
still be possible to add a declaration like (set world-seen true)
outside of the variant code.