[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#4178) /take doesn't warn about aitoggle

["Mike Kaufman" <kaufman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 07:26:27AM -0700, Gregory Berkolaiko wrote:
> 
> Mike,
> 
> I generally find the new connection/player system a bit confusing (never 
> sure when I need to say take and when not).

well, it is a new system. perhaps it will grow on you, but...

in a nushell, if you're connecting to a game that has a player with your
username, you will be automatically attached to that player. In any other
case, you will have to take.

> In particular:
> when I take an AI player (which I do regularly, for testing), it becomes 
> human without any warning.  It should definitely say "Player Blah is no 
> longer AI controlled" or some such thing.  Even better, have /takeai 
> command which does not toggle the AI.

well, I could probably do something about the no warning, but I don't like
the idea of yet another command that disregards a setting (autotoggle),
especially since it's a non-unique command. When to use /takeai and when to
use just /take? That's confusing.

> it would be good if server, at the time of creating AI players, would give 
> them standard usernames, so I could connect directly to their usernames 
> (and not have to do /take + /aitoggle).

I don't really like this, and I'll tell you why: you allow people not in
the game originally to log directly into the game bypassing the staging
area. allowconnect is going to get reborn as allowtake, and the controlling
user can prevent people from taking AI players. Doing the above will bypass
the security feature. Then you'd need a real allowconnect to prevent
clients from connecting period. This is starting to get complicated. The
simplest solution is to allow anyone to establish a connection to the
server, but prevent them from automatically attaching to a player.

The exception here is 'guest' connections. But if these clients cared about
others taking over their players, they would have logged in as a registered
user...

I understand that it's an extra step for developers, but after all, the
name of the game is about usability and playability [and now security] 
rather than ease of debugging. If you can come up with a way to make these
goals play nice together in this instance, I'll do it.

-mike