[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Project goals - Multiplayer

["Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa" <vasco.costa@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 7/12/06, saywhat@xxxxxxxxxxxx <saywhat@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Per Inge Mathisen wrote:
> > So perhaps what we need is a split of Freeciv into two projects, one
> > for a multiplayer game and one as a single player game?
>
>If that's what's required, then so be it. However, is it possible for
>there to be some backend part that's common between the two, with most
>of the forking being at the client end?  Or have i not understood the
>depth of the problem, and the amount of redesign required for this to
>work well?

   I hope that a split can be avoided.  As Vasco cautioned in
another post, the history of some games' development (Xconq and
LPmud were the examples that he cited) warns that fragmentation
of the development effort can be the beginning of the end (of
course I'm paraphrasing :-)).

I am strongly against forking the game into single player and multi player versions.
At best there may be simple ruleset changes. But I think even that should not be necessary.
If games like StarCraft can do both single player and multi-player well, why cannot we do the same?

Traditionally we balanced things for multi player and I believe that served us well. I believe multi player
gaming has a superset of the requirements of single player.

I was reminded of our weakest points even yesterday: balancing ( e.g. AI difficulty level)  and lack of a
game lobby ala Kali or Battle.net of sorts. I believe the first issue applies to both single player and
multi player, while implementing the second would not harm single player gaming.

-- 
Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa