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

["Jason Short" <jdorje@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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

Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa wrote:
> 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?

There's no problem with the encoding.  It's always sent from the server 
in UTF-8 and converted as needed by the client.

The problem is that UTF-8 is really big!  Typical fonts won't support 
all characters, and if your font doesn't support a character it doesn't 
matter if you know what that character is.  This would presumably only 
be a problem in multilingual multiplayer games.

But it's easy for the malicious player to name a city or player in a 
name that is full of garbage characters.  How do we prevent this?

> 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.

Yes, but the current solution is slightly better than this: it allows 
non-ascii names, but only if they come from the ruleset (never if they 
come from the player).

What's not allowed in the current system is any support for people who 
use entirely non-latin alphabets.  If you are a Chinese player, you are 
still forced to use latin (ascii) characters for your city and player 
names.  Even the Chinese ruleset names are transliterated.  This doesn't 
seem right.

jason