[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Floating barbarians ! (PR#292)

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Mar 06, 2000 at 01:04:54PM -0600, Tony Stuckey was heard to say:
> On Mon, Mar 06, 2000 at 01:57:56PM -0500, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> >   That's what I mean, though -- it seems like the client shouldn't be 
> > getting
> > that information for enemy units.  Is there a good reason to hand this out?
> >
> >   Either than, or someone should change gui-gtk to let you actually see what
> > the enemy units in a given stack are :)
> 
>       There are issues here.
>       If you have the square in question under constant observation, then
> yes, you see the units move into the square, and can argue that you should
> have memory aids which help you remember what you saw.
>       If you have just "discovered" the stack of units in the square, you
> have no knowledge of what's there other than the top unit, and whether
> there is more than one unit or not.
>       Also, if a Transport moves into a square with another transport and
> back out again, you should not be able to see the contents of either
> transport, because of the shell game aspect.
>       This is going to be quite hard to "get right".

  I think it seems pretty simple from this point of view -- either allow or
disallow viewing land unit stacks all the time, do the same for sea unit
stacks, but never show any unit which is inside a container unit.

  The real problem is that the protocol may currently not be set up to handle
sending info about whether units are stacked without sending the stack itself.
(I believe a similar problem is responsible for submarine positions being
 erroneously sent to all clients, although I haven't looked into that problem
 either..)

 Daniel