[Freeciv-Dev] Re: release plans

["Claus Leth Gregersen" <leth@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

<SNIP>

> I'm thinking about freeciv mainly as about multiplayer game. Fact that
> server and client can run on same machine is just a coincidence.
<SNIP>
>I'm not quite sure, but it seems to me that currently there is not way
>to make separate client and server packages (like rpm or deb) which
>would work independent of each other and could be both installed without
>conflicts at same time. Why ? You have to decide which one will include
>entire data dir.
<SNIP>

Well Freeciv started as a multiplayer game, and we had alot of requests for
AI,
so i think that most people play it singleplayer.
Actually at some point in the development, we tried to merge client and
server into one executable.
That would in my opinion be the ideal solution.
But it turned out to be more than 1 hours work, and we didn't do it. ;)
Since there ain't many games running on the metaserver just having the
client wouldn't do you much good.
My impression is that the major part of the multiplayer games, happends on
local labs.
It's much easier to coordinate a game that way, taking breaks etc..

I think there is pretty lot of singleplayer games going on out there,
and why bother them with seperated client/server packages?

One of the most cool things about having client/server in one executable,
would be that it would be quite easy to active the server part on another
client. Say we have a setup like this:

4 players (a,b c and d) play the game on a's server.

now a has to leave, and he shuts down the server. Now today the game is
totally over.

Instead with a client/server all in one solution, there could be a transfer
command, instead of just quitting.
transfer would send a savefile to one of the clients say b.
b would then take this savefile package and use it as input for his until
now inactive server.
There would have to be some closing and opening of connections, the other
clients, should get the ip of b
from a, and close there connection and reconnect to b.
All this could be done with just a few lines of code.
Actually it's still doable, but will require a little more work.

Another bonus of having server and client in one, would be that a
singleplayer game would take less resources, and there could be a dummy
network layer, so it would work on machines without tcp/ip.

/Claus Leth Gregersen.