[Freeciv-Dev] Re: [PATCH] Increase max players

[David Pfitzner <dwp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

s830@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

> This is a resend of the increase max players-patch submitted recently by
> Markus Linnala.

> The Bad: I see a strange bug with lots (40+) players in that I see some
> city locations on the map (Same as with seti, but not all the cities, just
> some)

The patch ignores that various things in the game are currently
bit-vectors where each bit corresponds to a player.  In particular
tile.known is currently an unsigned short (enough for 14 players 
+ 2 barbarian players; note that in the client tile.known is an 
enum type, but in the server it is a bit-vector).

I'm not sure what to think about this patch in general.

On the one hand I think having 120-odd players is silly, in
that I don't thinks its likely to be actually useful, or 
practical, or even fun (except maybe for the initial "wow" 
value, or stunts).  I guess its useful as a "marketing ploy", 
so we can show we're better than some game which only allows 
say 64 players... right :-/

On the other hand I'm not opposed in principle to having 
somewhat more than the current 14 (+2), but what should the
magic number be, and why impose artificial limits? 
I guess the answer to this is primarily technical issues,
such as the bit-vectors issue above: for practical reasons
there must be some maximum.  Though we could probably 
increase it to say 30+2 players (32-bit int bit-vector)
without too much trouble.

(Other bit-vectors I can think of off-hand are embassies,
and selecting nations -- currently limited to 64 nations,
using 2 x 32 bit ints.  There may be others)

Regards,
-- David