Changing the Rules

We would like to make FreeCol configurable, so that the game engine becomes capable of emulating many similar games. For this purpose, we have made many of the game's features configurable.

At some point in the future, we will probably add a special rule set editor, but at the moment, your only option is to edit the file specification.xml directly. This file defines the abilities of units, founding fathers, buildings, terrain types, goods and equipment, for example. You can find this file in the data/freecol directory.

This is still work in progress, however, and the schema for the rule set certain to change again in the future. If you wish to develop your own rule set, you will have to monitor FreeCol development closely.

This having been said, we are particularly interested in hearing about problems caused by your changes to the rule set. Some dialogs might be unable to display more types of goods than are currently defined, for example. Or other dialogs might not recognize your new Minuteman unit as an armed unit. Please help us improve FreeCol by telling us about such problems.

If you have a working rule set that adds a new flavour to the game, we will gladly distribute it along with our default rule set. If you have ideas that can not currently be implemented, we will probably try to remove these limitations.

If you try to modify the rule set, you are strongly encouraged to check whether the result is still valid. You can do this by validating the result with the command ant validate.



Subsections
Stian Grenborgen 2009-01-14