[CF-Devel] DM - God Finger - bleah!

[crossfire-devel at archives.real-time.com]

  In terms of privacy issues, hard to say.

  One can make the case that if you were a police officer and had to tell 
someone if they were under surveillance, you'd never actually catch them doing 
anything (or they are really stupid criminals).

  One can make the same case for crossfire - if there is a report of abuse, the 
DM may want to check it out, and not notify the player involved.  Because if the 
player suddenly got a notice 'you are under surveillance', of course that player 
is going to stop doing whatever abusive actions.

  I personally find it hard to envision what one would do in crossfire that is 
so secretive.  I could see things like private messages perhaps - even to the 
extent of things like 'says', if a couple players on by themselves on a map and 
are thinking of having a private conversation.

  As far as a 'snoop' for the dm - to see what the player sees without being 
there, this probably isn't that hard to do.  Add something a field to the 
player/socket, and when a dm starts to snoop, that is set to point to the player 
he is snooping on.  Then when it comes time to render the map, it uses the data 
for the snooped player, and not the one the dm is currently on.

  One could extend this a bit of course - include things like the commands the 
player enters, so you could see if they are invoking spells and what not. 
Because as I think about it, trying to discern/filter messages is very difficult 
- by the time new_draw_info() gets the message, and that is the obvious place to 
send a copy to the dm, there isn't really any context about the message itself, 
other than color.  So you could perhaps say 'if the color is ..., don't send to 
snooping dm'. (aside, one of the things on the TODO list is to change the passed 
in values to be context and not color).

  Now going back to the original issue - DM's not being able to see invisible - 
that is actually much more difficult to fix.

  That is because each square is generated once, and every player that can see 
it, sees the same thing.  If you notice for example, see invisible is actually 
an area of effect spell (makes invisible things visible for everyone), and not a 
personal spell such that only the caster can see the invisible objects.

  So to make that work for the DM, the map code would have to get redone - now 
for each and every space, you'd have to figure out what the dm sees special.

  This perhaps get easier if we limit see invisible of dm's to only see 
invisible players, which may be what is really desired.  That is a bit simpler 
(can fairly quickly cycle through all the players, see if any are invisible, and 
treat that special).

  As far as blocking players - the DM is a living creature, and thus when it 
goes to check if the space is blocked, it sees there is a living creature there, 
and then finds that there is the DM.

  This may be simpler to fix - the update_space() code (or is it 
update_position()) could be modified - if the creature is a player, and has DM 
set, don't set the flags for that space.  However, I'm not 100% if that will fix 
everything - monsters may still be able to 'find' the DM, because they search 
the list of players for nearby players (as a shortcut of searching all the 
spaces).  That could certainly get changed to skip DM's, etc, but there might be 
lots of bits like that.

  So if the goal is really to be able to spy on players, adding a spy/snoop 
command is probably the way to go.


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