TREATIES has issues:
* Treaties can cover attack, assault, paradrop, board, lboard, fire,
build (s|p|l|n) and enlist, but not bomb, launch, torpedo and
enlistment centers.
* Usability is very poor. While a treaty is in effect, every player
action that violates a treaty condition triggers a prompt like this:
This action is in contravention of treaty #0 (with Curmudgeon)
Do you wish to go ahead anyway? [yn]
If you decline, the action is not executed. If you accept, it is.
In both cases, your decision is reported in the news.
You cannot get rid of these prompts until the treaty expires.
* Virtually nobody uses them.
* Virtually unused code is buggy code. There is at least one race
condition: multifire() reads the firing sector, ship or land unit
before the treaty prompt, and writes it back after, triggering a
generation oops. Any updates made by other threads while trechk()
waits for input are wiped out, triggering a seqno mismatch oops.
* The treaty prompts could confuse smart clients that aren't prepared
for them. WinACE isn't, but is reported to work anyway at least
common usage. Ron Koenderink (the WinACE maintainer) suspects there
could be a few situations where it will fail.
This feature is not earning its keep. Remove it. Drop command
treaty, consider treaty, offer treaty, xdump treaty, reject treaties.
Output of accept changed, obviously.
Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@pond.sub.org>
Option GODNEWS controls news reports give's N_GIFT, N_TAKE, and edit's
and setsector's N_AIDS, N_HURTS.
They affect news headlines because of their non-zero r_good_will.
N_TAKE and N_HURTS can downgrade relations because of their negative
r_good_will. All tolerable, except N_TAKE has actor and victim
reverted: the deity running the give command is the victim, and the
sector owner is the actor. Because of that, give with a negative
amount downgrades the deity's relations towards the sector owner.
Inappropriate.
Has always been that way. Chainsaw disabled these news at
compile-time; to enable you had to define GODNEWS (not documented
anywhere). Empire 4.2.0 made GODNEWS a proper option, enabled by
default.
Fix by setting their r_good_will to zero.
Why upgrade? I'm not a lawyer, but here's my take on the differences
to version 2:
* Software patents: better protection against abuse of patents to
prevent users from exercising the rights under the GPL. I doubt
we'll get hit with a patent suit, but it's a good move just on
general principles.
* License compatibility: compatible with more free licenses, i.e. can
"steal" more free software for use in Empire. I don't expect to steal
much, but it's nice to have the option.
* Definition of "source code": modernization of some details for today's
networked world, to make it easier to distribute the software. Not
really relevant to us now, as we normally distribute full source code.
* Tivoization: this is about putting GPL-licensed software in hardware,
then make the hardware refuse to run modified software. "Neat" trick
to effectively deny its users their rights under the GPL. Abuse was
"pioneered" by TiVo (popular digital video recorders). GPLv3 forbids
it. Unlikely to become a problem for us.
* Internationalization: more careful wording, to harden the license
outside the US. The lawyers tell us it better be done that way.
* License violations: friendlier way to deal with license violations.
This has come out of past experience enforcing the GPL.
* Additional permissions: Probably not relevant to us.
Also include myself in the list of principal authors.
other. Ensure headers in include/ can be included in any order
(except for econfig-spec.h, which is special). New header types.h to
help avoid inclusion cycles. Sort include directives. Remove some
superflous includes.
undocumented feature: When a buyer didn't have enough money at the
time of the trade, the seller *automatically* granted a high-interest,
medium term loan for up to 90% of the price. This is just a silly
trap for unwary sellers and buyers alike.
(N_FIN_TROUBLE, N_CREDIT_JUNK): Unused, remove.
(rpt): Update accordingly.
(empfile): Correctly initialize members cids, csize, fids for all
EFF_STATIC tables except EF_SHIP_CHR, EF_PLANE_CHR, EF_LAND_CHR,
EF_NUKE_CHR, EF_META and the symbol tables.
