[CF List] First trials

[Mark Wedel]

Nils Lohner wrote:
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      Installation sugestion:
     
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      - have the 'maps' archive unpack into crossfire-<version/maps. and have
     
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        the installer install them automatically.  $datadir is defined there.
     
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        I had a problem with that too: according to some docs it would seem to
     
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        want $pregix/games/maps, but in reality it seems to look in
     
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        $prefix/share/crossfire/maps (which makes more sense). THis is
     
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        probably just an INSTALL or README cleanup.
     
     
 I don't see any real ambiguous notes in the INSTALL about the maps - it just
says they need to be unpacked into whatever datadir is, but doesn't really
mention where that may be.

 IMO, there is no real reason to unpack the maps into the server area, and then
copy them over.  Doing so results in twice the amount of disk space (and the
maps are the biggest user of disk space) and would lengthen the install time
(copying 30 MB of data will pretty much always take a non trivial amount of
time).  Notes about how to install the maps could be better (and in fact, adding
a note such that after you run 'make install', the last thing it says is
something like 'the maps should be unpacked into x/y/z' - the makefile can give
the real path for this, since it has gone through the variable substitution that
the README has not.



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      The client needs to support a -h or -help option too, and a -debug would
     
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      be good to see where it fails with connections (i.e. connectiong to
     
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      server:port etc.)
     
     
 It does support -help.  OTOH, if you enter any invalid command, you get the
usage message - the only different about -help is that it does not complain
about an invalid command.

 The error message about xpm is pretty bizarre.  I'm not going to worry about it
too much, as xpm support should probably get removed from everything in the not
too distant future.

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      The performance seems slow, both with PNG and XPM (PNG looks nicer
     
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      though... it also seems a little bigger).  Do you have any
     
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      performance-measuring code in the client or server?  That would be
     
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      useful... I think that the game may have slowed down when lots of items
     
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      were left lying around, even when I'm not directly on that map.  Not
     
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      sure though.
     
     
 Best measure is probably top.  Note that crossfire is not a really fast action
game.  The server basically does 8 turns/second.

 Performance on the client has no great measure.  From what work I have done,
most is actually spent on the map redraws (as of now, the client makes no real
use of hardware accelleration, as it is just basicaly blatting bits to the
screen).  the SDL client could use texture map or other hardware assistance for
drawing.


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      Hm.  Should it be?  The messages it printed out made me wonder.  I guess
     
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      it's harmless though.  It probably gets created when you save your
     
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      gdefaults.
     
     
 Yes, it should be created once it needs to save something there.

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      >> - after the first character I played, none of my characters have ANY
     
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      >>   melee weapons skils, no matter which race/type I pick!  AAh, I need to
     
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      >>   pick a type ( paladinl, etc.) before I can have any skill at all.
     
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      >>   This needs to eb a a FAQ
     
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      >This seemed quite obvious. But if didn't guessed it, it must certainly go=
     
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      >=20
     
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      >into the FAQ.
     
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      Better yet: put a panel in front of the exit with the info, and a gate
     
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      that the player needs to open.  That should take care of it.
     
     
 The problem was that sometime characters that already have chosen popped back
on that map after a save, so they needed some way to get out.  If no one has
seen that recently, removing the bypass that lets you get out without choosing
would also be a valid solution.


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      Hm.  True... maybe there could be an 'amulet of pause' or something that
     
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      teleports you to a safe location until you unpause?
     
     
 As a multiplayer game, this of course gets tricky.  If a player is able to
pause whenever in danger and wait for the calvary to arrive, life gets very
easy.  If we're going to allow someone to effectively pause via amulet or
whatever else, the actual mechanism doesn't make that much difference (it would
not be hard to add logic to the server which basically says monsters ignore
paused characters and paused character can't take damage).

 But consider this abuse:  Player has such abilities, and casts a whole bunch of
fireball spells, which say will engulf where the character is.  Character
engages gismo, and thus won't take damage from the spells himself, yet the
spells will still expand and kill everything nearby.  Player then unpauses, and
grabs whatever loot.

 This isn't to say that it would certainly be nice to be able to pause things -
more than once I have wanted to do so.  My main point here is that this is
something pretty tricky to do without opening up a lot of abuses.