[Freeciv-Dev] Re: More imporved game starting [patch]

[Andreas Kemnade <akemnade@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jason Short writes:
 > Daniel L Speyer wrote:
 > 
 > > Here is an improved version of Andreas's patch from back in October to
 > > control the server from the client.  This version supports multiple
 > > simultaneous games by checking which ports are available.
 > 
 > 
 > I never tried it out before, but now that I do it seems quite excellent. 
 >   Even something this simple could probably double freeciv's userbase.
 > 
 > 
 > > I'm thinking about illiminating the seperate server window, and making the
 > > chatline take that functionality (just give the starting user cmdlevel
 > > hack).  What do other people think?
 > 
 > 
 > At first, I thought that would be a good idea - but then I noticed the 
 > "start game" and "end game" buttons on the server window.  If this is 
 > expanded to include fuller (possibly even "full") control through the 
 > GUI, that'd be much better.
Ok, lets have a list of server commands in common code (not in
gui-gtk) and let the client display a button for each (important) command
(implemented like the local options dialog).

We could also parse the output of the show command and use it to
create a server options dialog. 

If the chatline input starts with '/' and the client has started the
server, the command can be sent through the pipe. Then the commandline
from the server window can be removed. 
But the output from the server should be shown somewhere in the server.

 > 
 > BTW: what does "end game" do?  It seems to just immediately terminate 
 > the server.  This is not very user-friendly.
It just sends "quit\n" to the server (through the pipe). 
 > 
 > Here's another idea: when you load a game, it should first load the game 
 > to the server and then popup a list of choices for the player name. 
 > This would be far superior IMO.  Unfortunately, this might be very hard 
 > to implement.
I don't think it is so difficult.
Just parse the output from the list command:
 - go to the line after the "------------------".
 - extract until the first whitespace 
 - go to the next line
 > 
 > A word of advice: submit it to the bug tracking system.  I'll try to 
The patch is basically from PR#977.
I'll try to implement the dialog in the gui-win32 client the next
days.

Greetings
Andreas Kemnade