[Freeciv-Dev] (PR#11858) Voting clean up

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

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=11858 >

Playtesting yesterday revealed to me a huge problem in voting: The nice
'more options' button, if used in pubserver games, or other games where
you do not have CTRL cmdlevel, is unable to set more than one option at a
time, and each of those have to be voted upon by everyone present.

The /firstlevel command does not work on pubserver:

  /firstlevel: You already have command access level 'info' or better.

It seems deliberately removed. This has the advantage of reducing cheating
by whoever does /firstlevel first, but also removes this way out of the
problem.

So what do we do? There are several options. First, we can make the /set
command cmdlevel_info until the game has started. This fixes the problem
for 'more options' button, but not for commands like /cre a, /team a ai,
etc.. We could make a whole lot of commands cmdlevel_info in pregame only,
though (set, create, team, ai, novice, hard, easy and normal).

Second, we can change voting so that instead of overwriting your previous
vote and getting a vote on each suggestion, as is now, each command that
needs voting for is queued up until you type "/vote start". Then a list of
options to be voted over is displayed and is voted over as a whole. This
has the disadvantage that such changesets, like votes are now, can be
rather cryptic, like "set endy 5000, cr ai1, tea ai1 ai". Expanding these
on the fly is non-trivial, I think.

Third, we can grant automatic firstlevel to the first player (the "game
owner") to join. This is the only player who can change stuff in pregame,
and has cmdlevel_ctrl to do this. If that player disconnects during
pregame, the game is reset. This has the advantage of being very simple
and easy to understand.

However, none of the above solutions bring us any closer to a solid and
user-friendly way to represent any vote for the user with a GUI. While the
third solution removes voting from pregame (perhaps excepting /start?), we
will still have voting during the game.

  - Per