[crossfire] Player accounts, new player creation mechanism

[Kevin R. Bulgrien]

> Here is a proposition for new player account mechanism and character
> management.
> 
> To be clear:
> * player = human playing on Crossfire
> * character = ingame character
> 
> When connecting to a server, a player can create or log in to an account.
> This account is linked to characters, and the player can manage (add,
> delete, maybe other things) them.

See below.

> Character creation mechanism is mostly moved to client, where the player
> can select race and statistics.
> I'd keep class to be chosen ingame for now, as it depends on maps and
> such.

Actually, I think this is the most difficult aspect of character creation at
the moment.  Without class selection in the same place as race and stats, it
requires external resources to adequately design a character.  If we're going
to improve character creation, I'd say rolling in class to the creation
process is far more important than the suggestion to have accounts on the
server as it would be a major improvement for the player.

Also, even if creation is pushed off to the client for execution, I think it
wise to consider that the information needs to be supplied by the server to
get away from some very clunky issues regarding information handling that
has to do with character creation.  At the moment, there are about 4 copies
of the Hall of Selection with identical information about each class.  This
is a pain to manage, and, furthermore, if character creation is pushed to the
client, then we don't want to have to maintain this information separately
for each client.

I was somewhat stymied by the great volume of technical nitpicks on Yann's
idea about a login server as expressed on IRC.  The implementation effort
need not be that great, as can be determined by more carefully considering
what actual work would be needed.  It could centralize character creation
in a way that provides both immediate and long term advantage.  I saw no
compelling reason to so thoroughly reject the suggestion and actually prefer
that the idea of the server-side login server module be reconsidered, and
integrated with this suggestion for client-side character generation.

> Characters can possibly be transferred between accounts. Account
> "survives" until removal by player, characters disappear on death on
> permadeath servers.

I rather do like the use of a single password per server... that's always a
pain in that I try not to reuse passwords from one server to the next in case
they were to be breakable.  I do not make a habit of trusting administrators
on systems. Even if the same password is reused per server, it is still common
for me to make the mistake of re-using a password from a different server out
of "typing habit".  By making a login account, the password is created only
once.

I do see this as somewhat nice, but still it strikes me as not as much of a
priority in that the value add seems somewhat low.  The main reason to include
it may be that if the design for a new character creation subsystem makes it
easy to do, or drives development of a cleaner design, then it might be done.

Kevin