SAIL has issues:
* Sail orders are executed at the update. Crafty players can use them
to get around the update window.
* The route is fixed at command time. You can't let the update find
the best route, like it does for distribution.
* The info pages documenting it amount to almost 100 non-blank lines
formatted. They claim you can follow friendly ships. This is
wrong. They also show incorrect follow syntax. Unlikely to be the
only errors.
* Few players use it. Makes it a nice hidey-hole for bugs. Here are
two nice ones:
- If follow's second argument is negative, the code attempts to
follow an uninitialized ship. Could well be a remote hole.
- If ship #1 follows #2 follows #3 follows #2, the update goes into
an infinite loop.
* It's more than 500 lines of rather crufty code nobody wants to
touch. Thanks to a big effort in Empire 2, it shares some code with
the navigation command. It still duplicates other navigation code.
The sharing complicates fixing the bugs demonstrated by
navi-march-test.
Reviewing, fixing and testing this mess isn't worth the opportunity
cost. Remove it instead. Drop commands follow, mquota, sail and
unsail. Drop ship selectors mquota, path, follow.
struct shpstr shrinks some more, on my system from 160 to 120 bytes.
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
dc73207a99