Re: [Freeciv-Dev] Re: [Freeciv] Observer

[Greg Wooledge <wooledge@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Mielke (michael@xxxxxxxxx) wrote:

> Not for your opponents, say, lets just say that a newbie wants to learn
> how to play by watching more experienced people play it.  There should be
> an observer port.  The feature would show the whole map, all the moves of
> all the players and learn from there.

That's a good idea, but I see two problems:

(1) It should be a server option -- some people might not want to allow
    observers because:

(2) How would you ensure that an active player doesn't use the observer
    port to gather reconaissance about the other players?

Problem (1) is trivial.

Problem (2) is not.  You could exclude observer connections from hosts
that the active players are using, but this is problematic -- a different
user on the same host might want to observe, or a player might have an
account on a second host and use that to access the observer port.

In fact, I can't think of *any* workaround for (2).  You could use a
password or some other secret to authenticate somebody -- i.e., to make
sure that someone is really the person they claim to be.  But how do
you prove that a person (really, a TCP connection) is *not* one of the
people they claim not to be?

-- 
Greg Wooledge                    | Distributed.NET http://www.distributed.net/
wooledge@xxxxxxxxxxx             | because a CPU is a terrible thing to waste.
http://www.kellnet.com/wooledge/ |