[Freeciv-Dev] Just an idea: Distributed client...

[Florian Klein <kleinf@xxxxxx>]

Hi!

After playing several Civ games, I would consider it useful if the
messages are written to a log file instead of the Civ screen. That
means, I just have another xterm running "tail -f civclient.messages" or
be able to grep messages out of it, e. g. "tail -f civclient.messages
|grep Pollution".

My idea is a "distributed" client: a daemon between the civserver and
(several) independent client apps, e. g. a small city dialog, a map,
Messages, Reports and Statistics, each one small (partial
textmode/commandline) apps.

This way I could say e.g.

> build Howitzer at Frankfurt
Frankfurt has stopped building Transport.
Frankfurt is now building Howitzer.
>

> list improvements at Frankfurt
Improvements at Frankfurt:

Aqueduct
City Walls
Colosseum
Granary
Mass Transit
Temple
...
>

or even
> for i in cities
  do
    if i builds Capitalization
    then
      build Engineers at i
    fi
  done
>

which is easier and faster than clicking through a lot of menues each
turn. Perhaps even shell commands would do this.
This would be great for many MUD fans :-) and for debugging.

The map window could be a reduced civclient, or a textmode output like
the map infos in the civgame*.sav files, or export to a jpg/gif/png and
view with seejpeg or xv, the way Lynx does...

Ciao,
Florian.