[Freeciv-Dev] Re: [Patch][RFC] Reduce superfluous tile_info packets

[Michael Stefaniuc <mstefani@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 06:07:32PM -0700, Raahul Kumar wrote:
> 
> --- Raimar Falke <hawk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 06:15:00AM -0700, Raahul Kumar wrote:
> > > I quite like that. It's a good thing packets sent are being reduced
> > > considering that
> > 
> > > when the CMA goes into CVS, the total amount of packets sent is
> > > going to increase dramatically.
> > 
> > Although I have no numbers I doubt this.
> > 
> 
> Take the current case. Jack is playing a freeciv game. He creates an aifill
> of 7 players. Two different scenarions happen in the client side ai vs
> server side
> 
> Server side(the current way)
> The ai never gets sent any packets about the location of its units. No packets
> about anything basically. And needless to say, the slowest part of the 
> equation
> in playing Freeciv is the dial up connection. My Athlon 800 has no problem
> with rendering the graphics, or the AI warmap maths.
> 
> Client side(the new way)
> 
> 7 client side AI's need at the bare minimum the info on where their cities
> and units are. This has to be through packets.
> The AI's need to communicate to the server the unit moves, change in city
> production, change in worker tiles, etc etc that the server side ai does not.
> 
> It is impossible for a client side AI to send as few packets as a server side
> AI.
> This is always going to be true for absolutely any game. This is not an
> argument
> against client side AI. After all, I quite like the agents. They're already 
> an important part of my gamestyle.
> 
> > > A client side ai is always going to send far more packets than a
> > > server side one.
IMHO "client" in "client side AI" refers to the protocol used between AI
and server and not to the location where the AI runs. The server would
fork and exec the AI and communicate to it like to a normal client over
the loopback interface of the server mashine. The server will have to
handle more packets but your client will only get the packets destinated
to it (like befor). And the loopback device of the server should be fast 
enough to handle the packets for the AI.

bye
        michael
-- 
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