[crossfire] Making maps easier to maintain, by creating custom archetypes for duplicated objects.

[Raphaël Quinet]

On Thu, 21 Sep 2006 20:48:03 -0700, Mark Wedel <mwedel at sonic.net> wrote:
>   My general thought was always that archetypes should be somewhat generic 
> objects - in other words, objects that map makers would likely find use for in 
> all sorts of maps.
> 
>   Thus, even a highly complex object (that scored really high in the above 
> criteria) probably shouldn't be an archetype if there is very limited places 
> they would be used.

I agree.  Although the idea of converting some things to archetypes sounds
good, I would also like to keep archetypes as relatively generic things.  If
some object that is a modified version of an archetype appears in several
maps, then this would be a good candidate to be put in a picker for all
crossfire editors, but this does not necessarily mean that it should become
a new archetype.  Collecting new candidates for pickers in the map editors
could be done semi-automatically.

>   If we do have scripts to find equivalent objects in maps, I wonder if instead 
> making archetypes that could/should be put in the map directory (tools directory 
> or something), and thus could be used to find such duplicates.  So we don't 
> necessarily need them to be archetypes, we just need to be able to easily find them.

Right.  I prefer to be able to identify quickly where these customized objects
are used so that I can decide on a case-by-case basis which ones should be
updated, instead of using an archetype that causes immediate changes to all
instances when it is updated (even in places where the original version should
have been kept).  One more reason for me to come back to my map checking
script that collects statistics about all objects.  I haven't touched it since
a long time...
 
-Raphaël