@lafayette, @ssoloff, @trevan, all other developers: What are your thoughts about attracting developers? What made developers join in the past? What made them leave? Would you see making Triple A attractive for developers as an objective? Would you consider this achievable? (In that case I might start a discussion thread.)

@mirkobruner @Frostion both of these are under the umbrella of rebranding which needs further discussion if any further action would be taken in this direction current consensus here is to replace the current start screen logo with the previous thing (current logo/icon)and discuss any branding changes for future releases.

@cernel I was tempted to create a 'pull' list of maps that should be pulled. It is easier to instead to remove those maps. We do have categories after all though to mark which maps are still works in progress.

@cernel said in Fontsize and dpi scaling: If it is feasible, the program should always enforce a pixel-per-pixel rendering as default (assuming vectorial graphic will never be supported). Vector graphics require fundamentally different software tools from png and svg isn't natively supported in java swing. Vectorizing the existing maps and artwork would be a lot of work. Then the map handling engine is based on pixel coordinates. Vector graphics would make more sense for interface icons (ex: icons on buttons, menuitems), which TripleA makes very limited use of currently. Icon Fonts would likely be the right solution as they allow scaling and theming.

With the above said, we can certainly discuss what would be more or less equal to rope in.

@cernel A single file for game notes could be difficult because then you have to encode the HTML in some way. You no longer could open the notes file in an web browser to get a preview of how it would render. With 2.6, if you want to organize games into folders with generic names, AFAIK you can do that now. You could not previously to 2.6

@LaFayette Before I was guessing what happened, but here is a little bit more detail; where letters = Territories and numbers = units in those territories. D2 = Territory "D" with 2 units in it. A1, B1, C1, D2, E2, F1, G1 Say I move the 1st unit in E2, it should return to E2, but it actually goes to D2. If I move the 2nd unit in E2, it should return to F1, but it actually goes to G1.

@squid_daddy Please take the liberty to update the docs to get them more up to date, fill in any missing details, and generally make them more useful for someone getting started

@hepps I would love for the ratings to be sorted out and refined. There is an open need for Map Admins to go through and do curation of maps, volunteers needed: https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/2707/map-curation-rating-maps-categories/1

@lafayette well i think having some kind of directional arrows behind the lock or maybe a map grid under the lock 3d style would have the same effect.

FWIW, the places that would need a fix are largely in code that will be deleted pretty imminently. That is why the fixes are in queue.

@LaFayette The alternative skin for 270BC is an example of changing also the units. There may be others. Here you can find a map-skin for RSoC that is actually about making the map bigger: https://github.com/Cernelius/red_sun_over_china-big_skin The current map-skin feature allows changing everything in the skin, and that is good. What is not very good is that it obliges you changing everything, so forcing duplication if you don't actually want to change everything. It is true that most map-skins are only about changing the map details, but I think this is beside the point (Of course, some things are more used or useful than others.).

@LaFayette said in TripleA Rules Sets: What would be ideal is to have a table describing different behaviors by rule set. We are actually on our way there. We have example maps that follow each rule set, all we need to do is to start teasing apart the behaviors that are different and then answer for each map, "does this follow that behavior, yes or no?" If we find that some rule sets are only very slightly different, simpler is better. The 'v3' moniker will be difficult to drop, if we can keep it simple and say "old edition", "revised edition" and "new edition", it could be easier to adopt. At this point though, without knowing what the rule sets actually are, it seems to be a first priority to know which rules are in each rule set before we do much of anything else.

@Cernel As we unzip a file, we will be doing a lot of checks (are all the required folders there? is there a centers.txt, etc.?) and as part of that process, we could enforce a casing convention. I have a tool that fixes capitalization. When I got image assets from @GenerationKILL sometimes the casing was a bit off, so I would just run this tool and it would conform every unit to a convention like this: Unit-Name.png regardless of the OS and regardless of the original naming. We could implement a similar normalization process at the map parsing level (though it might be hard to get map makers on the same page about which casing convention should be used). https://github.com/jdimeo/triplea-map-tools/blob/master/src/main/java/jdimeo/triplea/util/FixFileNames.java

So, would you be ok with removing some locks if it can be shown that the data is actually read only? I'm currently looking at ResourceList which is what GameData#getResourceList returns. The class has only one setter and it is only called during the game parse process and a test method. The data that ResourceList stores is a map of Strings and Resources. And Resource is a value object. ResourceList doesn't appear to need any sort of read lock since I don't see any way for it to change. If I see locks around GameData#getResourceList, can I just remove them? Would you like me to tag Resource and ResourceList somehow (such as @Value) to indicate that they are read-only objects?

@LaFayette Dont forget to add triplea.log to the list of files to uninstall.

That said, is there a particular reason (other than a chunk of code not really necessary to functionality) that save game files don't work that way? Java serialization was once popular, it was an initial design decision to use it, it was somewhat easy. We would actually like for save games to work more like you have described. It's a very large project, that is all, and we have a large backlog of small and large projects that we are working on and collectively there is not that much development labor available. Re: performance requirements These are the wrong things to focus on. First focus on functionality, what are you going to built? What value will it provide, how will it be used? You need a good product for anything else to matter. Then I'd encourage to stop worrying about specs. Simple and well done architectures are fast and perform well. Simple code is usually fast code. Once you have a reasonable design in place and functioning, then you can start analyzing where the performance bottlenecks are and where to go to optimize. It's a ways to get to that point, and once you are there the process is to measure, change, repeat. Humans have generally very bad intuitions for where performance problems will arise. It's also easy to try and fix all performance problems as optimization problems when they are really design problems. One can look at a block of code and wonder "how can I make this faster", and sometimes the right answer is, "how can I avoid needing to execute this in the first place?" That is why keeping things simple and working is very important, it lets you reason about what your code is doing. For example TripleA does a lot of calculations twice, why? Because there are 15 layers of call indirection separating the two which creates several thousands of lines of code in between the duplication. Bottom line OUr time is short in just about every way imaginable. I'm pretty sure and somewhat regrettfully going to say, if you want something that interoperates with TripleA, it's potentially one of and likely all of: untractable and/or a truly huge project We have wanted to for example to allow TripleA to run on web browsers, or phones. That project is probably 3-8 years away from being completed if it were started today.

Its a good idea, I like it.