[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Why client-side AI could be a Bad Thing

[Falk Hueffner <falk.hueffner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Arkadiusz Danilecki            <szopen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Hi there!
>       I finally had finished read archives of freeciv-dev for 1999/2000.
> I have some new ideas, which i will post in another mail, and i saw
> discussion about AIs. 
>       It seems that evverybody agreed that AI should be client-side.
> This is nice idea with many pluses, but it alsow has some drawbacks, and
> some of them are quite significant, i think.
> 
> 1) AI should cheat. Yes, it should. Unless someone create really clever
> AI, it will have no chances without cheating wwith opponents. And i think
> it is really hard implement cheating AI without overhead if it will be on
> client-side, without access to server data.

You can implement handicaps and advantages in the server and give the
AIs advantage. That would be even useful without client AIs because
often players with different amounts of experience play together.

> 2) Performance. If they will be client-side and communicate via network,
> it will cause some unnecessery overhead. If it will be separate process,
> it will cause overhead too.

Well, I'm pretty sure this is irrelevant. You can shuffle megabytes
per second around via a memory network, and the freeciv protocol
acually doesn't need that much bandwidth. Surely not more than a few
percent lost.

> 3)I have experience with newbies to freeciv and i see that they are
> sometimes terrfied when they had to type civserver and manually create AI.
> Half of them resign from game, saying it is too complicated, Imagine what
> will happened if they had to create AIat client side? 

aifill could do it for them, just like now.

> 4) Real-time AI. Hm. If u can make ai thinking in real time, it will be
> cool, but i think it could be too difficult. Lets imagine AI is coutnig
> which towns are safe. Situation has changedm it starts again. Situation
> has changedm it starts again. Etc Etc. I am not sure if it will cause That
> AI will be able to move only when all players finish move.

This is really a problem, but it doesn't have anything to do with
whether you have client-side or server-side AI.

> 5) I don't know what about you, but i hate to wait for others players,
> when i finished my turn. With client-side no-real time playing through
> network AI it will last even longer. Timeouts for AIs? Bue..

It's possible to write AIs that take only a few seconds for each turn;
they can do their work at the beginning of the turn, so no problem.

        Falk