[Freeciv-Dev] Re: borders patch (PR#1870)

["Mike Kaufman" <kaufman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jun 13, 2003 at 07:42:06AM -0700, Ben Webb wrote:
>       The borders code determines the national ownership of each tile
> at the server, and sends this in tile_info packets to clients. Hence,
> the approach has been server POV for some time. The fog of war bug is
> caused because the server only sends tile_info packets for non-fogged
> tiles; in the latest patch, updated ownership information is now sent
> for fogged tiles as well. As I've mentioned previously, this does mean
> that you can guess at enemy city locations rather accurately (for
> example, if you scout out an island and then move on and leave it fogged,
> you can tell as soon as another player establishes a city on that
> island, because the tile ownerships will change). I think this is how
> SMAC behaves. In any case, my suggestion for a possibly more realistic
> solution is to send tile ownership information for non-fogged tiles ONLY
> if those tiles are owned by you, or they directly border a tile owned by
> you. This way, you know your own borders exactly, but don't learn extra
> information about remote players, except where you can see their
> territory or they directly border your own tiles. Comments?

I agree, this is awful. If the server only sends updated nation ownership
for unfogged tiles, what are the consequences for the client? (where will
the client die?)

I imagine that we need to provide some mechanism for "stale" information. A
flag in the tile struct? That way the client can at least make a decision
on how far to trust the information it has.

-mike