[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#9995) RfP: is_sane_name and user names

["Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa" <vasc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=9995 >

On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, Per I. Mathisen wrote:

> <URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=9995 >
>
> Am I mistaken, or did you just commit a patch that outlawed a large
> portion of the city names in our nation rulesets?
>
> This is related to cheating. Making rubbish city names help confuse the
> enemy and make cooperation among allies difficult. Naming all your cities
> the same or seemingly the same will hide your capital. If you name all
> your cities in chinese characters, then it will be hard for your european
> player enemy to find both your capital and coordinate attacks, or even
> remember the city where you last lost a unit.
>
> Even so, I think UTF-8 city names should be allowed. And as long as we
> have those stupid leaders names, they should also be fully supported as
> UTF-8. Usernames should always be in ASCII.

This is a real bear. The clients should always see the same player names
and city names, irrespective of which encoding they are in. How can you
coordinate strategies otherwise?

Hence IMHO making them ASCII and displayable everywhere is less bad than
having cities that will have their names properly rendered by some
clients, and wrongly rendered by other clients.

---
Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa @ Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa