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>
--- How to build the info pages ---
Make remakes info pages, table of contents and index automatically.
This requires Perl 5 and troff. To remake just formatted info pages,
run make info.
To remake HTML info, run make html. This is not done by default. The
recommended start page is TOP.html, but you may also like all.html.
--- How to add a new info page ---
To create a new info page, follow these steps:
1. Decide which chapter to put your info page in:
Commands - Empire Commands
Concepts - Game concepts
Introduction - General info about playing Empire
Server - Info about the server
2. Decide what to call your info page:
- If it's an Empire command, give it the same name as the command
as listed in lib/player/empmod.c
- Info names are case-insensitive. Make sure there isn't another
one that differs only in case.
- Make sure your info page doesn't have the same name as an existing
subject or chapter.
3. Format your info page.
The file name for a page NAME must be NAME.t. It's easiest to start
with an existing file.
The first line must be a title header:
.TH arg1 arg2
- arg1 should be the chapter, one of: Command, Concept,
Introduction, Server
- arg2 is the title of your page. If it contains more than one
word, make sure it's in double quotes
- if the info page is for an Empire command, then arg2 must be the
command name in ALL UPPERCASE.
The second line must be a name header:
.NA arg1 arg2
- arg1 must be the name
- arg2 is a one-line description of the info page which will be put
on the subject pages that your info page belongs to. It should be
in double quotes
The third line must be a level header:
.LV arg
- arg must be a level, one of Basic, Expert, Obsolete
The last line should be a see also:
.SA "item1, item2, ..., subject1, subject2"
- the stuff in quotes is a list of other info pages which are
related to this page, and subjects to which this page belongs.
- the stuff in quotes must all be on the same line
- You must include at least one subject in the list (at the end of
the list by convention). Valid subjects are listed in
info/subjects.mk.
The lines in between can contain troff requests. The following
additional requests are available:
Empire command syntax:
.SY "command <ARGS>"
An Empire command example:
.EX "command args"
No Formatting:
.NF
this stuff
won't be formatted
.FI
Begin paragraph:
.s1
Item in a description:
.L
Fancy troff magic is prone to break HTML output.
4. Format your info page, update table of contents and index
Run make info html. If it fails, peruse the error messages and fix
your info page.
==APPENDIX A - What exactly the Perl scripts do==
The scripts read all of the info pages and create a two-level table of
contents for them, organized by subject. An info page belongs to a
subject if that subject appears as an entry in the .SA ("SEE ALSO")
field of the info page.
The output of these scripts is a bunch of .t files. The file TOP.t is
the top-level table of contents and lists all of the subjects. Then
for each SUBJECT, a SUBJECT.t file is created, listing all of the info
pages that belong to it.
==APPENDIX B - The checklist.pl script==
FIXME This does not work at the moment
This little perl script compares the "list" of legal Empire commands
in your server with the Empire commands documented in info. To run
it, login to your game and type:
[##:##]% list > list.out
Then, move the list.out file to this directory and run checklist.pl.
Markus Armbruster
a109de948b