Vici Plugins

[Dave DeLong]

I had an idea:

We should make the definitions of a single game style plugable. By
that I mean that we should put all the rules for creating the starting
Risk layout into a single, loadable bundle. That way we can add new
maps/styles simply by putting a plugin in the appropriate folder.

There should be different kinds of plugins: Map Plugins (define
countries and the connections between them), Game Plugins (define game
play rules; triggers, etc), and so on.

What do you think?

Dave

[Ontario Britton]

I haven't used cocoa "plugins", but I like how modular this sounds.

Thanks,
Ontario Britton

Game Developer

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[Dave DeLong]

They're actually really easy to use!  You just create a bundle (there's an Xcode template for it), and put it somewhere on the hard drive.  Then another program can find the path to the bundle, create an NSBundle object out of it, and call "load" on the object to load the code.  Once you've done that, you ask the bundle for its "principalClass", and then alloc/init it.

There's a decent amount of documentation on the subject:  http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/CoreFoundation/Conceptual/CFBundles/Introduction/Introduction.html

Also, another question: do we want Vici to be 10.5 compatible?  I'm inclined to say let's make it 10.6 only so we can take advantage of some Snow Leopard Goodness™.

Dave

[Cory Kilger]

I love the idea of the plugins.  Then anyone can write an AI.  And then we could have an AI tournament.  And it would be awesome.  We could have various categories, like Best Classic Risk AI, Most Versatile AI (handles different rules well), etc.

I think it'd be nice to support 10.5, but I would also like to use 10.6 stuff, like GDC if possible.  Can we design the game so that it can use Snow Leopard Goodness™ if on SL, but uses 10.5 when not?

Cory

[Dave DeLong]

Mostly; we can use most of Grand Central Dispatch via the NSOperation
and NSOperationQueue API. However, some of the other nice stuff
(stuff in NSFileManager, Blocks, etc) are 10.6 only.

I'm OK w/ using 10.5 as the base SDK. I just wanted to get the
question out there before the code got too far along. =)

Dave

[Cory Kilger]

I think that to keep this open to as many people as possible, we
should support 10.5. I'm cool with creating a 10.6 target that uses
optimized code or some other cool features that a 10.5 version
wouldn't support.

[Jay Carr]

This is pretty common in a professional environment as well right?
Might be good practice...