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

[Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa <vasc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 18 Oct 2002, Daniel L Speyer wrote:

> 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?

This is a Windows centric type of thinking. The mixing up of the client
and server concepts for the sake of "usability". Well I don't feel such
bastardisation is really necessary. Even for that.
I guess it is because I am used to playing multiplayer networked UNIX
based games.

IMHO when the original Freeciv designers made this game they used the UNIX
concept. I also feel that is the correct way to do things in the long run.
Playing a game with humans is a different thing altogether of playing a
single-player game against the AI.
This is the concept that needs to be reeinforced.

> 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.

If that is a problem why don't we allow players on civserver.freeciv.org
to save?

Sure it will involve extra coding but so does what you people are proposing.

You may think we don't have the space to save the games, but the fact is,
civserver currently has loads of saved games on it for the purposes of
scoring and showing summary reports.

Of course we must impose some sort of limits to people will not abuse the
system. So some sort of quota system must be in order.

=== I propose the following system:

Players may register an account on the server. They will be identified by
playername and password.
This is not mandatory. Like on IRC, you may use the service if you haven't
identified, however that way you will not have your score entered into the
civserver ranking or have load/save permissions.

As for quotas we could use the time honoured slot system.

Each player has a certain number of "slots" where he can store games.
Let's say 3 or 5. An identified player has the following extra server
commands:

slotlist
slotload <number>
slotsave <number>
slotremove <number>
slotname <number> <comment string>

The server stores the player savegames under a directory specified by the
FREECIV_PLAYER_DIR variable. e.g.:

players/
        vasc/
                1.sav.gz
                2.sav.gz
                ...

We can ignore security issues related to stolen passwords for now. Most
webboards and multi-user games ignore them too.

Comments?

---
Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa @ Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa