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

[Jules Bean <jmlb2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 28 Jan 2000, Arkadiusz Danilecki wrote:

> 
> On Fri, 28 Jan 2000, Jules Bean wrote:
> 
> A.D.Danilecki wrote: 
> > > >1) AI should cheat. Yes, it should. Unless someone create
> 
> > I don't like cheating.
> 
>       I don't like cheating too, but i like long hard games, and it is
> hard for such a game with freciv AI

FreeCiv is a positive feedback game.  So you don't really get 'long hard'
games.  Games are only hard until you have the upper hand, but once you
get the clear upper hand, you are more or less unbeatable.

> 
> > Instead, use a handicap.
> 
>       Handicap can's be used instead. If ai is stupid, it will play
> stupid no matter how big advantage it gets at beginning. When it can
> cheat, it can at least try be equal opponent to human players.
>       When i think about cheating, i think more about knowledge about
> map etc. not breaking all rules.

I don't really see this.  I'm sure a handicap will do.  Double its hit
points of all its units, say.

> 
> > If the AI is cheating, then I find it hard to play against because I don't
> > understand the rules it's playing by.  One of the things that annoyed me
> > about payciv.  The AI should play by the same rules.
> 
>       server option cheat off? :)

Of course.

> > > >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?
> > 
> > Yes.  But this is totally irrelevant to the issue of making things
> > separate executables.  It just means that civclient needs to be taught to
> > run civserver itself, if necessary.
> > 
> 
> i can agree with this. So, instead of having two processes on my poor k166
> i will have 16 processes. Hm. No overhead right?

*sigh*

No.

This is one of the most frequently misunderstood things about Linux and
unix-style systems.  Systems with an advance VM system and advanced
multitasking system suffer a neglible overhead for splitting a complex
task into several processes in a logical fashion.

I'm not saying there is *no* overhead, but if we look to improve freeciv
performance, simply improve the goto functions :-)

Jules

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