[Freeciv-Dev] Re: freeciv feedback

[Martin Olveyra <molv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2001.11.25 05:24 Raimar Falke wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 25, 2001 at 04:22:14AM -0300, Martin Olveyra wrote:

> > 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.
This is the normal working of a normal (human driven) client. When a lot of
clients are connected to a remote server, each time changes are made to a
city (or anything else), the client doesn't display anything until the
server returns information.
Also, there is no need to have all the AI clients in a remote equipment.
Some of them could run in the same computer as the server does.
And third, I think there is no need to reimplement the client-server
protocol. The actual one is optimized for speed, and it would be a bad idea
to pay in speed just for human-friendly purposes.