Pity about the private e-mail address and rewriting of history! I don't have a GitHub solution to that, although on BitBucket I use aliases (
https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/set-email-aliases-792298714.html), and checking the history of a repo locally on Mercurial, I indeed see the alias, not the e-mail address, from the commits - except the ones I haven't mapped to aliases yet. I don't know what secret sauce they use, and it may well be rewriting behind the scenes, but they have a nice UI fixing that sort of situation on their site.
I like the list, it's ambitious. A few questions/comments.
- I'm curious how you handle layers. In my Civ3 editor, I also have layers separated - but I draw on a per-tile basis. So I'll draw the base layer of tile 1, then the forest layer of tile 1, then the hills, then the cities, then the units, etc. Then do the same on tile 2. If the user has hills not drawn, then it's still one tile at a time, but the hills step is skipped. I could see an alternative, however, of drawing all the base layers, then all the forests, then all the hills, etc. Not sure if it would really matter from a performance/features standpoint.
- I like your restructuring thoughts, separating human/computer/gameplay mechanic/barbarians. I'm curious how an AI plugin would work - would there be stages and hooks that a plugin could interoperate with? This is an area I don't know much about.
- Which Select Folder dialog is used currently? It's amazing how many there are on Windows. My personal least-favorite is the folder tree without an option to paste in the path; so many clicks of the expand folder button. I'd probably take the Windows 3.1 two-pane style over that one; at least it works well with double clicks. But other than the tree one, anything from XP's default (five favorites on the left, "normal" right pane) works decently well.
- Do all the platforms use GTK for the graphics? I can't remember which toolkit you chose for them.
- Text references are a pain point in my editor, in part because I didn't bother with making things translatable for so long that I have what seems like a million strings. The other hazard is that my French is no longer good enough to do much of it myself, and the lack of volunteers and most things being hard-coded strings has created a chicken-or-the-egg problem. So I'd recommend tackling it before too long, and ideally having at least one translation, so the size of the problem isn't prohibitive later on. Kind of like supporting multiple CPU architectures - if a program only supports MIPS, it has no PowerPC version, and it's both hard to gain PowerPC users without support, and hard to commit the resources to support PowerPC without already having the users. But it's English and French instead of MIPS and PowerPC.
- I like the website focus moving away from news, and the ideas to it (notably plugin database and translation contribution) are good. But they seem a little bit ahead of the game, and in past experience, off-CFC discussion forums usually struggle to garner enough new users (such as WePlayCiv, SOC [which no longer exists], there's probably a couple others I'm forgetting). Long-term, CivOne may become complete enough to avoid that problem, but I wouldn't put too much emphasis on that early, and would definitely keep updating this thread.
Okay, maybe that was a large value of "a few". But even though my intro to the series was Civ3, I'm definitely still following this thread and hoping to see it succeed!
