Beta Map Creator - Useful?
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Did you find it useful? If so, this is the place to let us know how! The reasons to remove it from the code base and future releases of the game are mounting, and it is getting to be pretty compelling:
- there does not seem to be any advocates for the beta map creator. The coders for it are inactive. Nobody is asking for the beta map creator specificalyk to be fixed or improved, nobody is reporting bugs on it
- there is a good bit of code to support it. This is code we have to maintain whether we want to or not, and generally keep working (even though it is buggy)
- fixing it is probably not worth it. We have some existing tools that are pretty similar, investing more in those and migrating any uesful features would seem to be more cost effective for the labor. Plus, I'm pretty interesting in doing something like adding "parse" version numbers to the XML. so the game engine could parse the XML differently depending on the "parse" number. This would then allow us to make some really radical changes to how the config is specified while still supporting all the previous existing maps. The beta map creator is not really set up to do this, it is hard to see how that code can come along for that ride.
So, with a sad heart I think the fate of the beta map creator code is perhaps sealed. On the plus side, with git, code is never lost. We can always go back and look at any code that ever existed in the code base at any point in time, so we can always go back and refer to the map creator code, even resurrect it wholesale if we want.
Alright, with that said, if you found the beta map creator useful, I'd like to know and discuss how we can re-incorporate those features back into the game.
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@LaFayette I can test it.... but since the existing one functions well I have never even tried it.
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Thanks! As a data point that should be linked here, Frostion did an interesting write up on the beta map creator: https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/files/1099902/BetaMapCreatorTesting.docx
