[Freeciv-Dev] Re: freeciv feedback

[Christian Knoke <ChrisK@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Nov 25, 2001 at 09:24:10AM +0100, Raimar Falke wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 25, 2001 at 04:22:14AM -0300, Martin Olveyra wrote:

[programming client-side ai]

> > 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).

I'm not sure with this. First it affects how agents are implemented.
I think, no matter how much calculation you do in the client, you
should never never rely on that the server comes to the same result.
You should rather accept / deal with that the agent calculations
simply are not perfect.

Second, if we go to agents / automated clients / client side ai's
- and I think we should - we need independece between client
and server, and, yes, it would be nice to have a guide on that
interface.

Christian

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* Christian Knoke                           +49 4852 92248 *
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