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

["Per I. Mathisen" <per@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 13 Jun 2003, 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 fogof 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 think the "more realistic" solution is going to be error prone. How are
you going to be "discovering" borders that are stale? What happens if you
move a unit into a border which is far from its previously known position?
You would get drawing problems, but I guess the drawing problems might be
your least worry...

I am not worried by the "information leak" of the new implementation.
Classify it as a feature. If you want, I can invent some "realism"
rationale for it.

While testing it, I found the dark blue border very hard to read. Some
borders looked rather similar and may be hard to pick out by people with
some colour blindness. I realize we may run out of distinguishable bright
colours, but maybe we can combine colours in some way, eg every second
line dot in a different colour? Perhaps the dots should be of varying
length too, so that you can recognize them on a morse code like pattern?

Also, I think borders should go further into the ocean. It looks a little
cramped the current way. It is almost claustrophobic at times...

  - Per