[crossfire] Moving server towards a modularized system?

[Mark Wedel]

Yann Chachkoff wrote:
>
> Of course, you may object that "this is pure conjecture, that would get only
> results on the long-term, if they ever get any". Sure - this is an important
> change. I think that it all comes down to asking the question: do we want to
> polish the current infrastructure, keeping adding details to it, or do we
> want it to evolve into something more ambitious ? I think that we should, at
> some point, clearly put on the table the future direction we want Crossfire
> to go to, goals we want it to achieve not today or the next month, but on a
> long-term perspective.

  That is a fair point - what is the long term goals of crossfire, and perhaps 
just as much to the point, how do we get there.

  One problem is that I think lots of different things are being discussed 
without any real concrete/clear examples.  Broad strokes are being drawn, and 
this results in each person having a different interpretation of what the final 
picture may look like and whether or not they will like it.

  In terms of making crossfire completely modular so it can be a game framework, 
once again a nice idea.  I'm not sure however if it wouldn't be easier/better to 
start from a clean slate - probably a lot of crossfire code could be re-used, 
but there is lots of code in crossfire right now to handle case X so maps that 
use that feature don't break, etc.  A clean slate could get rid of those hacks 
and then have a clean well understood interface.  The problem there is this 
becomes more an exercise of a good design with it not immediately applicable to 
anything - that cleanup is likely to make it work too oddly with lots of 
crossfire maps and/or objects.

  One could say that right now, a good cleanup effort in the code could be made 
to get rid of those hacks - I think in many cases, a programmatic fix has been 
done because it was deemed easier/faster than fixing/modifying say 20 maps.

  I've also seen some past discussion about cleaning up function calls within 
function calls, dependencies, etc.  That also sounds great to clean up, but I'm 
also wondering how that can be done.

  I doubt people writing the code are just calling functions they don't need to 
call, so I am not sure right now how that gets fixed up without other more broad 
changes.

  But I think in total, there is some level of agreement that a code clean 
up/modularization is a good idea.  What is less clear is what is the best way to 
do it, and what form it will take.  So as I said in a previous message, it may 
be a good idea for those that are wanting/willing to do this to post some more 
specific examples of what they are talking about doing.