[Freeciv-Dev] somebody fix struct *player! (was: FoW remove player bug)

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On Tue, May 16, 2000 at 08:39:51PM +0200, Thue Janus Kristensen wrote:
> I kinda forgot taking server_remove_player(), and the player renumbering
> that takes place, into account when I ade the FoW patch. This should make
> it work again.
> (Actually I had no idea it existed...)

Why oh why are players identified by their position in game.players[]
when this position can change during the game?  This is horrible,
as shown by the awkward copying that goes on in your patch.

Somebody (not me, I'm afraid) could do us all a great favour by rewriting
the code such that struct *player pointers are permanent, immutable
player identifiers.  All this would take is

 - a big array or linked list to hold all players that ever come
   into existence in the course of a game
 - changing game.players[] to be an array of struct player *pointers*
 - removing player.plrid and changing all references to it
 - changing all code that tries to identify players by their attributes

A bonus: another unique player identifier will be its index in the big
array/list; this can be saved into savegames to allow players to be
identified across different savegames of the same game.  This feature
will allow the implementation of the /load foo.sav and /rename Foo
commands.  It will also simplify the implementation of reporting
tools thAT operate on savefiles.

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