Re: [Freeciv-Dev] Client/server

[Alan Schmitt <Alan.Schmitt@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I have not contributed any code to the freeciv development (except for a
quick and dirty port of the server to the beos a few months ago) but I'd
like to express my opinion about this issue anyway.

I also really like the idea of a server that just answer to games order and
follows the rules, and provides a clean interface for clients. However, some
tools, like the goto command, are usually needed by all clients and might be
considered worth putting in the server. I'm not so sure about auto-settlers
and city plans, because these might be customised and it might prove more
difficult to imagine the kind of messages needed to customize them than
simple game orders.

Maybe it would be nice to have a modular approach where part of the client
takes care of remembering the game state for the player it serves (like
remembering the map, what it is building and where, so that it does not need
to keep asking the server) and another part would be the ui, or a client ai,
which would be built above the previous part. I guess this must sound like
the ui abstraction layer, and in a way it is. The problem here is the
interaction between these two parts: callback functions, packet-like
messages ...

Well, that was my 2 eurocents ;-)

Alan