Too many clients (was Re: [CF-Devel] sdl client)

[Mark Wedel]

 In the sdl client thread, it was mentioned that the number of clients makes it
such that some changes to the protocol or server were not done because of the
effort.

 I'd be curious as to what has been deferred from development due to the number
of clients.

 I'd also like to hear what future changes people think might happen that would
require reworking of the protocol/client.

 Now in my mind, there are several categories of changes:

1) Changes that are optional, and a client can select the new functionality via
the 'setup' protocol command.  These are not a problem with multiple clients.

2) Changes mades that do not effect the GUI, ie, all the changes are in the non
GUI portion/data structures.  This could also be extra information, change of a
data field, new stat fields, etc.  These are not a problem if the gui is off a
common source base (as the gtk, gnome, and x11 client is right now).  Now it may
be desirable to extend the GUI to make best use of these new features, but not
doing so will not result in the client failing.

3) Changes that require changes to the GUI or the client will fail.  These are
the main problem, but fortunately the least common.  The one that comes
immediately to mind is allowing arbitrary image sizes instead of everything
being the fixed size.

 I'd like to solicit peoples opinions on other possible future changes.  It
seems that some planning and foresight may better give an idea of how to best
decide what to do - if the arbitary image size is the only foreseeable change
that falls into category #3, than seperate guis are not as much a problem (the
java and DX clients still have problems because they are divergent from the
common code - the SDL client is currently in that category, but I think it can
be modified to share the same common code.