[CF-Devel] Client/server protocol enhancements.

[Scott MacFiggen]

On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 12:01:15AM -0800, Mark Wedel wrote:
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      Scott MacFiggen wrote:
     
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      Memory is cheap.  Or at least, if it is a runtime option, you can elect to use
     
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      it if you have the cpu and memory to spare. Since the fog map already has that
     
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      information, it doesn't really use more memory to store the other spaces.  I
     
     
When I said it was memory intensive I meant if you had a mapview with
actual scroll bars. That would imply the entire map is rendered all the time
but only what was in the current viewport would be seen. Although if I 
were to implement it I would allow the user to move the viewport around
and just re-render as the user scrolled around. That wouldn't take any
more memory 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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       That is probably true.  It depends a lot of if you think that knowledge 
     
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      should be discovered or not.  Of course, we could always do it both 
     
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      ways and have some server setting that controls eg - if the server 
     
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      admin disables the user from knowing that information, the information 
     
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      is sent in the same form, just the damage and increments and so forth 
     
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      are zero.  If the server admin wants to share it, then the real values 
     
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      get sent.
     
     
The more configurable the server the better in my opinion. 
Customized servers would certainly make the game more interesting.
 

	-Scott