[Freeciv-Dev] Re: connect dialog ver 3 (PR#1911)

[Daniel L Speyer <dspeyer@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 18 Oct 2002, Mike Kaufman wrote:
> > [snip]
> > o I feel this is for _single_player_games_. Inviting your friends to play
> >   really merits starting up a different server process don't you agree? 
> > This 
> >   is mainly the reason why I didn't include Daniels patch to show incoming 
> >   connections. It was a neat little patch, but out of sync with this 
> > project.
> > [snip]

I would seriously disagree here.  It strikes me as unreasonable that an
end-user-targeted game should require command-line usage at all.  I hope
that RH8.1 will omit civserver from its menu, and people will get used to
simply runnig Freeciv, purely graphically.  Now, short of reading
documentation or source, how are users who learn of freeciv this way going
to know how to start a seperate server?

Now, admittedly, hosting a game could be made seperate from starting
single-player, but what would that gain us?  Every single-player option
applies in multiplayer, so (considering the GUI design) seperate options
would just make clutter at the startup screen and blank space in the
start-single-game screen.

And yes, based on actual observations, many people who are uncomfortable
on a command line will want to play multi-player, and no,
civserver.freeciv.org is not a solution, because they will want to save.

--Daniel Speyer
If you *don't* consider sharing information to be morally equivalent to 
kidnapping and murder on the high seas, you probably shouldn't use the
phrase "software piracy."