Re: [pbmserv-dev] Init()

[Douglas Zander <dzander@solaria.sol.net>]

First I wish to apologize to Richard for the tone of my original posting.
I was initially upset that Richard discouraged my Soccolot2 gametype idea,
but I understood his reasons and agree with him.  Everyone must understand
that there are legitimate reasons for not spinning off similar gametypes as
separate game code; more code means more maintenance and more confusion
amoung the server's players as to the different games offered.

Now I wish to ask those who posted suggestions to think about them.
1) First I wish to discuss making note of the move number. Let us
assume that a gametype program is revised and there are two sections
of code; one for the old board files and one for new board files that
will be started.  When a new board has been played for a while, it will
have a large move count that will make it look as if it is an old board
file, correct?  :-)
2) I am not sure about the "incrementing an integer" system, but let us
assume an integer parameter is added to the new game board files that 
are started; how do we prevent this parameter from being tacked on to 
the old game board files?  Which routine would we use to add this new
parameter to only the _new_ game board file... "Abalone::Init()"? - which 
is called everytime a move is made to *any* game board file?  :-)  
Remember that the problem (as I see it) is that there is *not* a specific
routine that is guaranteed to be used *only once* and only at the creation
of the board file (101 102 103 etc...)
Now I understand that there well could be some ingenious yet confoundedly
tedious solution to this problem.  Yet I believe that a routine added to 
the source code that would be called only once at game board file creation
would greatly help us with revisions and updates by allowing us to place a
parameter in the board files the *first* time it is started and would not
be altered later on and thus could be used as an identification tag to
determine how the game engine should read the rest of the input from the 
game board file and how to manipulate this data.  (whew!)
I guess this is one of those improvements we should put on our "to do" list?
:-)

--
 Douglas Zander