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

[rf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Raimar Falke)]

On Mon, Oct 14, 2002 at 04:22:12PM +0300, Veli Mankinen wrote:
> > > > 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.

The information you want are all available as server commands. So we "only"
need a the stream based intervace and Mike's
add-connected-but-non-player-users patch (aka auth*.diff). The better
interface could be achieved by a gui-less client. Which just implements the
packet-based network protocol.

        Raimar