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

[Veli Mankinen <veli@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Oct 14, 2002 at 06:17:41AM -0700, Raimar Falke wrote:
> 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, ...).

Maybe this "root observer" information could also be accessed via the
kind of a interface that I introduced in the logport patch. That way it
would be much easier to write programs with any tcp aware scripting
languages. That was the main point in my patch, not to use the packet
oriented protocol that freeciv normally uses but to use some simpler
protocol that is only used for accessing various information from the
server.

    - Veli Mankinen