These were special settings only for the win32-drivers, and
introduced in the very first version we track.
Time kinda had caught up with those variables, so it is time to
say farewell.
force_full_redraw was most likely a debug functionality "in case
our dirty-rect fails". This should no longer be needed.
display_hz was cute, as it had a max of 120. That is kinda
out-dated information, but I also doubt anyone was really using
this.
Most modern games run on 60 fps, and for good reason. This gives
a much smoother experiences.
As some people have monitors that can do 144Hz or even 240Hz, allow
people to configure the refresh rate. Of course, the higher you
set the value, the more time the game spends on drawing pixels
instead of simulating the game, which has an effect on simulation
speed.
The simulation will still always run at 33.33 fps, and is not
influences by this setting.
Many of the member variables that are used in save/load are inside types
that are not standard layout types. Using pointer arithmetics to determine
addresses of members inside types that are not standard layout is generally
undefined behaviour. If we'd use C++17, it is conditionally supported, which means
each compiler may or may not support it. And even then using it for individual
array elements is syntactically not supported the the standard offsetof function.
Unfortunately, the trickery employed for saving linkgraph settings causes quite some
clutter in the settings ini files.
Despite what it looked like, you could never really change the
ending-year (it was always reset to 2050 on start-up). See commit
683b65ee1 for details. As a side-effect, the variable that was
suppose to store the ending-year was just zero, never containing
a real ending-year.
MAX_YEAR is set to 5000000, but having an ending-year set to the
same meant you could bypass this, and play till the uint32 wrapped.
The game can either show highscore or wrap year, not both. When
you would do both, every year you get the highscore dialog.
By changing the maximum value of ending-year to 4999999 we prevent
this issue.
With \x, we sometimes had to do the "" trick, as the length is not
predefined. With C++11 bringing \u to the specs, which has a preset
length, we no longer need the "" trick.
We set the strings to u8, to ensure all compilers use UTF-8 encoding
for the \u characters.
This was triggered by newer CLangs, which start to warn if you
use "" in the middle of a string, wondering if that was your
intention. It is a good question. And this is our answer :)
CMake works on all our supported platforms, like MSVC, Mingw, GCC,
Clang, and many more. It allows for a single way of doing things,
so no longer we need shell scripts and vbs scripts to work on all
our supported platforms.
Additionally, CMake allows to generate project files for like MSVC,
KDevelop, etc.
This heavily reduces the lines of code we need to support multiple
platforms from a project perspective.
Addtiionally, this heavily improves our detection of libraries, etc.
Michael Lutz