[Freeciv-Dev] Re: freeciv feedback

[Raimar Falke <hawk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Nov 25, 2001 at 04:22:14AM -0300, Martin Olveyra wrote:
> On 2001.11.24 22:18 Kenn Munro wrote:
> > I've been playing Freeciv for a year, and never knew that the middle
> > mouse button did anything.  Quite useful.  Suppose I should take a look
> > through the Help and see what else I'm missing. :o
> > 
> > I think the area of biggest need for improvement is the AI. 
> > Specifically, it should be smarter and able to do diplomacy.  When I
> > first started playing Freeciv, after coming from Civ1/2, that was the
> > only disappointment: that I had to always be at war with the AI.  Now
> > that I'm a better player, I'd also like the AI to be more challenging.
> > 
> > I've recently started looking through the AI code, and hopefully will be
> > able to offer some specific recommendations for improvements sometime in
> > the future.
> > 
> > Questions: Now that Civ3 is out, when/how will Freeciv start to adopt
> > the new rules?  Will it be gradually, or most-at-once?  Perhaps it would
> > be better to start the Civ3 rules before drastic changes were made to
> > the current Freeciv AI.  I see on the roadmap that better Civ2
> > compatibility comes before Civ3, but a lot of the work required for Civ2
> > compatibility would have to be re-done once the change to Civ3 rules was
> > made.
> > 
> 
> I think it is a bad idea to follow the commercial civ changes.
> First of all, if we do that, we will never reach a perfect code.
> Second, why follow other people ideas? This community has different ideas
> and approaches about how the game could be.
> Third, and I agree with you, the most important thing that must be done is
> a very high improvement of the AI. And this is the more difficult part. The
> AI programming is an extense technic and theory by itself. It is not enough
> to programm a given reaction to a given situation. The AI must have
> variability (fuzzy logic?), must think at large (strategic) scale, and must
> be capable to learn. A very serious AI programming could become a complete
> separate proyect by itself, and the obvious start point is to separate the
> AI from the server, that is, build AI clients, so freeciv could be a test
> zone for different approaches, different AI models and different
> programmers around the community, without the need to touch the freeciv
> code. May be it would be nice to write a complete guide to client-server
> communication to help the interested programmers to do that.

As pointed out in the past: it is a very nice idea (for the first
moment) to code a complete new client (and so need to reimplement the
client-server protocol) but this fails. Consider the case where you
made changes to a city and want to calculate the city to see the
effects: either you let the server do this (very slow) or you do it in
the client. However if you do it in the client you have to do it in
the same way as the server. So you can either copy the current code
(and for a city calculation for example you need a lot of code) and
you then have to track the code and update the copy (for example the
recently introduces game.fulltradesize and game.notradesize are such a
change). So the most reasonable approach (at least to me) is using the
existing freeciv code and infrastructure. This may mean a new
client/gui-guiless directory or the integration into some existing
client (like agents should be).

        Raimar
-- 
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