[CF-Devel] Client/server protocol enhancements.

[Mark Wedel]

Scott MacFiggen wrote:
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      On Mon, Dec 31, 2001 at 06:31:08PM -0800, Mark Wedel wrote:
     
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      >  A minor wishlist for me would be to make the map in the gtk client
     
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      >  scrollable - if using fog of war, it is sometimes convenient to
     
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      >  thing 'so what was over there again', and being able to scroll to
     
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      >  over their would be cool.  That probably  isn't too hard, but for
     
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      >  reasons of optimization, you really only want to render what is actually
     
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      >  being shown on the monitor, and not the entire canvas.
     
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        I've thought about this myself, it should be easy to implement but
     
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        it would be memory intensive..
     
     
 Memory is cheap.  Or at least, if it is a runtime option, you can elect to use
it if you have the cpu and memory to spare.  Since the fog map already has that
information, it doesn't really use more memory to store the other spaces.  I
wonder if maybe having it be a seperate pane you can toggle between (eg, show
what you know either as a pop up or switching in the normal game window).  If
this approach is taken, you could perhaps also simplify it by not animating that
window - that means the cost is only in the space to store that surface and in
the time to render it when the player switches to it.  Alternatively, as the
player scrolls around, it could render it - in a sense, the surface size is that
of the window the player is scrolling it around in, but as the player says
'scroll left', the client figures out the new offset and draws it on the
surface.  In that case, the memory use shouldn't be that much at all.


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      I read a game design book a while back that was pretty blunt on this
     
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      subject. The book said it was bad game design to hide things from players.
     
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      The basic idea was why put something in your game and then not tell
     
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      the player about it..
     
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      Also, I would think any good wizard who has spent years studying his
     
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      magic would know the approximate effectivness of his spells.
     
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      Anyway, if this info gets sent over to the client, I'll modify the
     
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      gtk client to make use of it.
     
     
 That is probably true.  It depends a lot of if you think that knowledge should
be discovered or not.  Of course, we could always do it both ways and have some
server setting that controls eg - if the server admin disables the user from
knowing that information, the information is sent in the same form, just the
damage and increments and so forth are zero.  If the server admin wants to share
it, then the real values get sent.


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      I would prefer it all in one step, easier for a newbie to figure out
     
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      what is going on.. The hall of hereos thing works ok too though.
     
     
 At some level, the hall of selection would need to exist for quite a while
simply to support the older clients that don't support the selection process as
described in the previous mail messages (eg, the client handling most of it).