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Goals & Assumptions

Empire V is an exercise in modern software engineering and design. It's based on the well documented behavior of Empire 4. I don't intend to change the gameplay in any significant way. The exercise is to redesign it with modern programming practices.

Therefore, we have the ideal "customer": The original design of Empire 4... who is always clear, available and takes criticism very well.

Design Philosophy

@startuml "Design. Then code." !theme crt-amber left to right direction

(Start) #line.bold artifact Design component Code

Start --> Design Design --> Code

@enduml

  1. Embrace thoughtful, best-of-breed, modern Software Engineering design practices

    • Fully documented, tested, loosely coupled and extensible

  2. Is correct & efficient

  3. Major design decisions are documented:

    • Alternative approaches
    • Pros and cons
    • Mitigations
    • Triggers for reevaluation

  4. Has an open, application-friendly API

  5. Is fun

I'm writing Empire V because I want to learn more about Object-Oriented Programming. Specifically, I want to become a practitioner of design patterns and modern C++. Empire 4 is well understood and documented inasmuch as it's an existing program that I intend to replicate. Detailed user requirements need a substantial amount of work and evolve during design and implementation. We are in a unique situation where the requirements for Empire are very well documented and stable. This allows us to focus on the design.

High Level Design Requirements

In no particular order, here are the things I'd like Empire V to do:

  • International UNICODE support
    • Make it easy to translate from one language to another
    • Including number & date formatting
    • Consider support fo right-to-left languages
  • Use modern tools for logging, debugging, telemetry, performance monitoring, etc.
  • Use modern exception-handling
  • Is persistent
  • Use modern Software Engineering practices like:
    • Continuous integration
    • Source-level documentation
    • Unit testing
    • Integration testing
    • Static analysis / linting
    • Build orchestration
  • Is secure by design
  • Use continual validation w/ built-in health checks

Assumptions

  • Lots of memory
  • Multicore CPU
  • Fast, reliable network