[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#2641) islands from the client's point of view

["Davide Pagnin via RT" <rt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2003-01-25 at 17:01, Mike Kaufman via RT wrote:
> here's a new patch which removes the need for the RESET_CONTINENTS special
> case.
> 
> -mike

Mike, any news on this?

After the latest IRC meeting, you agreed with Raimar and Jason, that
some changes they were requiring were possible.

Are you going to make those changes to the patch?

btw, I've read the island5e version and found another problems, beside
the one I've already pointed to you.

Just for the record:

Critical situation 1: 
Player A is the owner of two cities (X and Y) on the same island and he
setup a trade route between them.
Some time afterwords, player B, do discover city X and conquer it.
For CMA compliance it is needed at that moment, that Player A is
informed that city X is trading with city Y and that the two cities are
on the same continent. (This means that the traderoute check should be
made also when a city do change its owner)

Critical situation 2:
Player A is the owner of city X, player B is the owner of city Y.
They both reside in the same huge pangaea continent, but they are not
aware of where they are.
Player A, do a sea Exploration and reach the other side of the continent
(but he ignores that it is the same continent).
At that point he discover city Y, owned by player B, and he create a
trade route between the city X and city Y.
At this point, nor A and neither B, knows that city X and city Y are on
the same continent.
BUT, for CMA compliance, it is nevertheless needed that both A and B are
informed that city X and city Y are on the same continent!
Then you need to change your trade route establishment check, instead of
looking if plrtile are known, you have to check if servertile are on the
same island, and then inform the involved players.

I do agree with Raimar also on the fact that changing continent
numbering from unsigned to signed, isn't needed nor is a good idea.
If we ever want to check if two "ocean" continent are the same
continent, we can easily extend the concept of continent also to water
tiles and do a check for is_ocean() to understand if that continent is a
land continent or a water continent. This isn't perhaps as efficient as
your negative/positive idea, but has the added chance to be extensible
in the future, for modpack writers, that will perhaps add underground
tiles and sky-tiles. 
(Just thing of a "mongo" modpack with Flash Gordon and all the variety
of different terrains)

On the client/server renumbering and recycling of continent numbers, I
do think that we have to consider actual situation and then improve that
situation, even step by step.

My 2 cents are to just do as better as we can, in the first attempt,
with particular care to resolve the CMA conflicts situations.
Afterwords we can address the "not optimality" of the
renumbering/recycling problems, both on server and on client.

I hope to hear more from you, and obviously from Jason and Raimar.

        Ciao, Davide