Backwards Compatibility Policy

[Iridar]

Backwards Compatibility Policy

The Community Promotion Screen is intended to be backwards compatible with New Promotion Screen By Default as much as possible, as long as it doesn't interfere with CPS's basic functions, or stands in the way of considerable improvements.

This post keeps track of the current backwards compatibility relationship and is updated as necessary.

Config Vars

• IgnoreClassNames - disregarded, see below for context.
• APRequiresTrainingCenter - disregarded, set in Mod Config Menu now.
• RevealAllAbilities - disregarded, set in Mod Config Menu now.
• ClassAbilitiesPerRank - fully supported, though the purpose of having it configurable is dubious.
• ClassCustomAbilityCost - fully supported and expanded: if ClassName is left empty, the specified AbilityCost will be used for all soldier classes, expect for those who do have class-specific custom ability cost.

NPSBD Script Package

To be able to access config vars meant for the NPSBD, CPS ships the entire NPSBD script package exactly as it is in the latest NPSBD workshop version. This means that both CPS and NPSBD can be active at the same time, CPS will just quietly kill NPSBD in its sleep and take over its functions.

This has a downside: if NPBSD is ever updated for any reason, its updated script package will clash with the NPSBD script package shipped by CPS, potentially causing all kinds of issues. For this reason we have added a pop-up message (#26 and #33) that will inform the player that they're ought to disable NPSBD while using CPS.

Building against NPSBD

The main CPS class, CPS_UIArmory_PromotionHero, does not extend NPSBD_UIArmory_PromotionHero, so it is not backwards compatible with any of its functions, such as GetCustomAbilityPointCost(), which have a different function definition in CPS_UIArmory_PromotionHero.

So in a hypothetical situation, where a mod was built against NPSBD to access current promotion screen as NPSBD_UIArmory_PromotionHero, and then run some of its functions, then a mod like that would still be able to launch alongside CPS, thanks to CPS including NPSBD script package, but the mod would be unable to cast the current promotion screen to NPSBD_UIArmory_PromotionHero. It's hard to come up with a legitimate use-case for doing something like this, though.

[Iridar]

During some of my refactoring, I have changed function definitions, but it has occurred to me that perhaps we're ought to keep the original function, just potentially change their implementation? To keep things backwards compatible, so that if a third party mod was built against original NPSBD (for whatever reason), then it can also work against CPS?

Although I'm not sure why would anybody want to build against CPS / NPSBD, to my knowledge no mods do that, and it's not like NPSBD has some sort of special logic that cannot be just copypasted.

Personally I don't think it's important to maintain backwards compatibility to that extent, just keeping it compatible with configuration for the original NPSBD should be enough for 99% of potential situations.

---

To add to this: CPS will ship the entire NPSBD script package unchanged, so any mod that was built against NPBSD will work with CPS as well. We're also fully backwards compatible with config intended for NPSBD, with one exception: we ignore the IgnoreClassNames config array which didn't have much (any) use in NPSBD, but in theory it could have been used by a mod to tell it to not override the promotion screen for regular soldiers. Kinda against the purpose of the mod, and we can't support it anyway, as that would make NPSBD itself disable CPS's replacement of said promotion screen.

[Iridar]

On further consideration following a real use case, we should make sure that if we implement our version of functions that are present in UIArmory_PromotionHero class, such as GetAbilityPointCost(), we must make sure not to change function definitions. I'll have to inspect the code to check if we're currently doing that.

[Iridar]

I have checked around, and it doesn't look like we're changing function definitions of any functions from UIArmory_PromotionHero. We are changing some function definitions we've copied from NPBSB script package, but seeing as CPS_UIArmory_PromotionHero does not extend NPSBD_UIArmory_PromotionHero, they cannot be used interchangeably anyway by other mods, so I think it's fine to keep it this way unless there's an actual use case for doing otherwise.