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

["Ben Webb" <ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Jul 06, 2003 at 01:04:10PM -0700, ChrisK@xxxxxxxx wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 06:35:14AM -0700, Ben Webb wrote:
> > New version newborders-20030704.patch now available at
> > http://freecivac.sourceforge.net/ (newborders-semifog-20030626.patch
> > should still apply on top of this).
> I'm happy with this.

Cool. Like Per said, claiming ocean tiles with 5 bordering land tiles
(rather than 7) will claim a few tiles in "real" (i.e. not inland)
oceans, but having compared the two, I think his solution is the
better one.

Are there any other issues that need to be fixed before CVS inclusion?

> There is still a inland lake problem; the attached png shows part of an
> ocean but I think this applies to lakes, too. I don't worry about.

In this particular case you have a 1x2 unclaimed ocean, surrounded by
claimed ocean and land tiles. I have seen similar 1x2 and 1x1 unclaimed
regions. There is a fairly straightforward solution - after claiming
tiles, any that remain unclaimed should also be claimed if they are
surrounded by 7 or more claimed tiles. This would require additional map
iterations though, and it's a bit of a hack - but in this particular
case, you have a large bay rather than an actual inland ocean/lake, and
so "proper" detection of lakes wouldn't help anyway.

> omniscient vs. semifogged:
> 
> I'm clearly for semifogged; the omnicient version allows to pinpoint a city
> and its owner as soon as it is founded; set borders 1 e.g., or with a clever
> code determine the positions from the border line.

True - that was my motivation for semifogged in the first place.

> Finally I want to offer a radical thought: Why does a player need to know
> his own borders? Isn't it early enough to know once the tiles are visible?

The problem is that if you obey fog of war strictly, for your own
borders, then it looks very weird. (I think Jason posted a screenshot of
this, from an early patch, but I can't find it right now.) Whenever you
build a new city, it will appear to claim only the unfogged region
immediately around the city, and you have to send a scout out to
rediscover your borders. It looks quite untidy! You still see similar
behaviour in the worst case for enemies that you don't share a border
with (in the semifogged case) but that's harder to fix - perhaps all
ownerships within "n" squares of a seen enemy tile should be updated?

        Ben
-- 
ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx         http://bellatrix.pcl.ox.ac.uk/~ben/
"You know my methods, Watson."
        - 'The Crooked Man', Sir Arthur Conan Doyle