[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Creating dead player after the game has started.

[Raimar Falke <rf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Oct 13, 2002 at 06:01:58PM +0200, Reinier Post wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 12, 2002 at 05:40:22PM -0500, Mike Kaufman wrote:
> > On Sat, Oct 12, 2002 at 11:36:43PM +0200, Thomas Strub wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > > 
> > > some people want to observe games. Until now they join a game, choose a
> > > nation and disband there units to see the hole game. With gen 2 there is
> > > an empty island and with other generators there are free starting
> > > positions. I don't like the empty islands, but i think that people
> > > should have the possibility to look at games.
> > > 
> > > With my patch its possible to create dead players after the game has
> > > started. 
> > 
> > this is really a kludge.
> 
> I think it's an excellent kludge: small, clean, fully functional,
> an improvement in every way.  Worth including.

But it still is a kludge. And while we may apply kludges before a
release ;) normally we don't.

> > The right way to do this is allow connections to
> > the server that aren't players. My old client-auth patch does this and
> > allows connections to attach to players either as a controller or an 
> > observer
> > (so you can have multiple controllers as well).
> 
> For reference, this patch is under PR#1767.
> 
> I still have to try it (sorry).  What I find really confusing is
> the term "observer".  This can be used to mean two things:
> 
>   - a player observer: someone who can see a player does, but cannot
>     do anything; this is what dwp's multiple connections allow
>   - a game observer: someone who can see (most of) what happens in the
>     game, but is not a player and cannot do anything; this has always been
>     the position of a dead player in Freeciv

Traditionally "observer" means the first. But I agree that we also
need the second. It would be some kind of root observer: can look into
any city, report and so on for every player. A huge kind of
information. To break this into smaller pieces we _may_ want to model
this with a two dimensional matrix: first dimension are the players
which I can observe, second is the kind of thing I can observe (map,
cities, research, ...).

        Raimar

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