[Freeciv-Dev] the contents of savegames (was: Preparations for other AIs and humans)

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On Mon, Jan 15, 2001 at 03:27:34PM -0800, David Pfitzner wrote:
> ½²«íµØ <iquin@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: 
> 
> > A good AI should never use up any space in the savegame.
> 
> You mean a good AI never maintains any state information?  
> Sounds unlikely to me.

Couldn't a good AI depend *mainly* on the state of the current game
for its performance?  What you'd lose is history information
('2 turns ago there was an enemy city here with 3 musketeers').

How bad is this in practice?  Would people force restarts just
to have an easier time against the AI?

It seems so untidy to let the server save anything except
the actual game state.

> > Also, have I mentioned before that savegames could have been
> > implemented as "a log of all the packets sent to the server +
> > random seed"?
> 
> Only if you don't mind your savegame breaking whenever the server
> changes its behaviour, eg due to new development (ie, often).

Also, most of the relevant information can be found in the successive
savefiles.  The savefiles for a long game are 20K a piece compressed,
5M in total.  That seems quite a lot of information for the AI to process.

> -- David

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