[Freeciv] Re: play by email version

[Raimar Falke <rf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 10:05:09AM +0000, John Allman wrote:
> Ah - now again i dont know too much about the internal workings of the 
> game. Each action in a turn alters the games state? So action A by 
> client 1 before action B by client 2 could produce a different result 
> than action B before action A? This indeed is a problem. As far as i 
> understand it, most pbem games are processed in stages. A moving stage, 
> a constructing stage, an attack stage or whatever. The system is 
> designed so that the order in which actions were taken during a turn 
> makes no difference. Clearly this could be a real problem for making a 
> pbem version of freeciv. 

> I'd really need to know more about how actions are processed by the
> server before i could say more though...

This is not done as seperate as it should be. On top of this it isn't
documented except in the code. This problem has bitten us before (see
#725 <http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=725>).

So defining, implementing and documenting a certain well defined order
have benefits outside the PBEM issue.

> As i understood it freeciv was a true turn based game

IMHO it isn't. Conflicts (like A and B from above) are decided on the
first-come-first-served rule. This is IMHO a real time aspect which a
true turn based game doesn't have. Because of this all actions
generate an immediate response (success or error) since actions can
fail. And this is the reason why the client needs a connection to the
server all the time.

This bit of realtime is a feature and makes games faster. However it
also makes freeciv not a true turn based game and so harder to
PBEMize.

        Raimar

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