[CF-Devel] XPM-PNG image set completed! (mostly)

[Mark Wedel]

Sebastien Bracquemont wrote:

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      A good thing i think is to have a "tile server" , separated from the game
     
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      server (in a logical way).
     
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      Clients could connect to the "tile server" to update their tilesets.
     
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      This server could be accessed by the artists to add their tiles.
     
     
 this has been discussed before, but still has these problems:
1) If the tileserver is down, the game may very well be unplayable (need the
images to play).
2) If there is one tile server per real server, thus just makes a more
complicated setup (two programs to run/restart if images are added (as
presumably, if image are added, new archs were added, which means the real
server would need to get restarted also).  So in this case, nothing is really
gained, except more complication.
3) If instead, deal servers are unrelated to the real servers, the problem comes
again - someone sets up server XYZ and now needs someway to update the image
server with custom images they may have.  This is not insurmountable, but gets
much more complicated.  Many people may be a bit leary of most anyone out there
sending (and having the server store for later retrieval) what basically amounts
to arbitrary data.  Now you can put some basic check in (size can not be larger
than 2K or the like), but this gets a whole host of security concerns.

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      The client will have to have an option to enable the player to get some new
     
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      tilesets. (cf Mark's modif nb 1 to the client)
     
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      One good thing is that the game server will only have to do game logic!
     
     
 Note that the image logic in the server right now is very basic.  In fact, as
far as the server is concerned, its just holding data - it has no idea the form
of the data.  The bigger simplication would to be always use caching by default
- always send image name, and client is responsible for requesting images.  This
means that the server does not have to track what images it has sent to the
client, and simplifies a lot more mode than just the send image logic.