33. A2. Appendix: Extreme Netrek
Description
This article is from the netrek Frequently Offered Clever Suggestions list, by Tom Holub doosh@best.com with numerous contributions by others.
33. A2. Appendix: Extreme Netrek
From: async@illuminati.io.com (Felix Sebastian Gallo)
Three planets; earth, rom, indi. In an equilateral triangle 1.5
screen lengths on a side. All planets start with 30 armies; Indi has
independent armies. No pops, no agris, all planets repair/fuel.
Bases regenerate with 45 seconds remaining. Six-player t-mode, anyone
can base. Standard vanilla ships. First side to take a planet wins;
after five minutes of t-mode the galaxy resets.
A game similar to this one has been implemented in the vanilla
server. If you go to an empty server with some friends and send TRIPLE
to yourself, you may be able to play Triple Planet Mayhem. It's a nice
change of pace. A3. Appendix: How to propose a change First of all,
if it's in here, don't post it to rec.games.netrek. It's in here for a
reason: it was suggested, and died. That doesn't mean you can't ask a
server deity to add it for you; some of them are quite amenable to new
ideas (the weirder the better).
The most important item to remember is DETAIL. Describe your change in
absolutely painful amounts of detail. Include sample code at the end,
if you have it.
For example, take a look at Clever Suggestion #24 (mine dropping). I
have a list of questions that must be answered by the person proposing
what, on the surface, seems to be a very simple idea. You need to
anticipate what people will ask, and provide details for all
contingencies.
A modest proposal might look like this:
* Summary: explain in a couple of sentences what you want to do.
* Explanation: explain in depth how what you're planning will work,
from a player's perspective. Don't include lists of source files,
cost estimates, or source code here; this should be readable by
Admiral Fubar, even if old Foo couldn't write a line of C to save
his/her/its life.
* Justification: explain why the world needs this change. Explain how
it will improve the game, and why it is important enough to spend
time doing it.
* Rebuttal: play Devil's Advocate, and dream up every possible
objection to your proposal. Then answer those objections. This
ought to save hundreds if not thousands of dollars by avoiding yet
another r.g.n flamefest. It will also make it easier to add to the
FOCS.
* Technical stuff: if you've already made the changes or you're
familiar with the client and server, explain where you think the
changes need to be made and how much effort it will take. Include
source code here if you have it, but keep it short! If it's huge,
make the context diffs or the modified files available for FTP.
If you just have a dopey little change, there's no reason in the world
why you can't just post the code to r.g.n and say, "here's some nice
code, feel free to use it if you want." I did visible tractor beams
this way, and look at how far they've gone. (Tedd Hadley gets credit
for the nice segemented lines though.) All source code bug fixes are
posted this way, usually as context diffs (use diff -c oldfile newfile
... the order is important).
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