[Uh-user] Building upgrades

[Andreas]

Hey team,

we finally discussed this issue on our meeting today (Nov 12th 09). And 
- believe it or not - we came up with some decision which can be found 
in our wiki:
http://wiki.unknown-horizons.org/index.php/DD/Buildings/Building_upgrades

For completeness quoted here:

 >There are currently 3 kinds of buildings upgrades we agreed on:
 >
 >MANUAL UPGRADES - Buildings like branch office and warehouse can/need 
 >to be upgraded manually at a cost of certain resources. Such upgrades 
 >will improve the buildings in some way and may also affect the 
building >graphics.
 >
 >AUTOMATIC UPGRADES W/ COSTS - Residents will always upgrade 
 >automatically at a cost of certain resources. The upgrade will always 
 >affect capacities (max. amount of inhabitants) and the resident 
 >graphics while the amount of resources available for the upgrade can 
be >specified by the player. This kind of updates is limited to residents.
 >
 >AUTOMATIC UPGRADES W/O COSTS - Service and production buildings will 
 >upgrade automatically without the cost of additional resources. This 
 >upgrade affects building graphics only.
 >	CAPACITY UPGRADES - For service and production buildings 	> 
additional capacity upgrades (production speed, collector count, >	and 
so on) can be purchased. (Those upgrades are a whole new 	
 >	feature and need further discussion!)

Because the player should have the opportunity to not only have his 
service and production building graphics updated, but should also have 
some "real" upgrades affecting building capacities, we came up with the 
- rather old - idea of introducing capacity upgrades as known from other 
RTS games. Being a whole new feature this of course means further 
discussions. (Btw. this issue is also important for our decision on 
fisherman behaviour!)

The main problem we are facing is the question how to make this feature 
available in a usable way for the player. Currently there are two 
suggestions:

1. Capacity upgrades have to be purchased for each building individually.

2. Capacity upgrades have to be purchased once for all buildings of the 
same type.

The first means a lot of micro managment which could be handled by 
providing a nice overview dialogue with some filter options to handle 
all those upgrades at once and maybe even assign certain upgrades for 
buildings being purchased automatically on build.
The second in the meantime is much more simple, but maybe a bit to 
simple from a gameplay point of view.

A brief example of a possible capacity upgrade (invented values):

Lumberjack:
Carrier 1
Production speed 10secs.
Running costs 30gp

Upgrade - Second lumberjack:
Carrier +1
Production speed /2
Running costs +15gp

Upgraded lumberjack:
Carrier 2
Production speed 5secs
Running costs 45gp

Your input is very welcome here!

Another issue is the technical implementation of the upgrade function - 
which will most likely be realized by totycro. I would really appreciate 
a system which can automatically detect if buildings can be upgraded or 
not. While we have one folder for each increment in our building 
directory structure it would be very nice if the funtion could check on 
settlement level up if there is a building directory with the same name 
in the other increment directory. When found one automatically apply the 
graphics or when not stick to the old one. No idea how CPU-intensive 
this will be. This would make things very easy for graphic artists to 
add new graphics especially for automatic upgrades at any time.

FOR levelup DO
	IF pioneers HAS lumberjack
		USE pioneers.lumberjack
	ELSE
	 	USE sailors.lumberjack

I hope this clarifies things for the coders among you :P

Again, your input is very welcome here!


For the time being,
Andreas