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

[Veli Mankinen <veli@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Oct 14, 2002 at 03:40:45PM +0200, Raimar Falke wrote:
> 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.
> 

Yes, that would do it. Although then one would have to use popen() etc...
I would also want to see the logfile output there. In fact that was the
main point (to see when the turns end and inform it somehow).

    - Veli Mankinen