Re: [Freeciv-Dev] A few client bugs and misfeatures

[Nick Lamb <njl98r@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 23 Nov 1998, Massimo Campostrini wrote:

> I've been playing the CVS from Nov 17, plus my recent city_nn patch.
> Most things are quite nice (good work on that configurable city
> advisor, and the message options are great).  But I still see some
> client bugs and misfeatures:
> 
> "myrand" is not initialized in the client, and always returns 0.  No
> big deal, it's only used by my patched "city_name_suggestion", and it
> just makes the suggestion to the human player not random (it works
> fine for the AI cities); but it should be fixed (how? read the seed
> from the server?)

The server seed is intentionally not sent to the client, if it was sent
then it might be possible, because we have freely available source, for the
client to recreate some of the calculations taking place in the server.
This would make it possible to e.g. predict the outcome of a battle in
advance, know whether a trireme will be lost if left at sea, whether a
city or unit will be bribed etc.

I think this argument was made on the freeciv list and the consensus
was that the seed should just not be used by the client. If you need it
then perhaps the server could create extra random seeds for the clients
and send each one a different seed? This seems like a lot of work for
such a simple patch though.

Nick.