Re: Cconq

[Hans Ronne <hronne at telia dot com>]

>Still kind of a bummer that it doesn't seem to be possible to have
>Xconq & Cconq players in the same game; I think it would be really
>intriguing to stage a single network game featuring players using a
>Mac, a WinTel box, a UNIX box, and a text-only terminal (and possibly
>interfaces as well) simultaneously.  In fact, if anyone ever does was
>to try and get something like that in the works to help raise Xconq
>awareness, let me know and I should be able to drum up some players
>with different machine types.

This would indeed be fun, but in order for this to work somebody would have
to write new init code with startup dialogs for cconq, as you find in the
tcltk and mac interfaces.

There are three types of network games in xconq, but only two of them work
at present:

1. The oldest type of network game is the one supported by the x11
interface, a.k.a. xtconq. In this case, there is only one program, which
runs on one computer. This program can, however, open several X displays
(both local and remote) so that more than one player can participate. You
start this kind of network game by using the -r option on the command line:

xtconq -r one@localhost:0.0 two@localhost:0.0

This will open two X displays on your local computer, so that you can play
against yourself.

This option does not work with the tcltk (xconq) or curses (cconq)
interfaces, not even if you run them under X11. If you try it you will get
an init warning.

2. The second type of network game used the -host and -join command line
option. This was an early version of the network code, where the host would
start a game which other players then could join. It does not work today.
The reason for this is that the network code no longer permits a player to
join a game that has already launched.  You can therefore still start a
game with the -host option, but nobody will be able to join it.

3. The third type of network game is the one currently supported by the
tcltk and mac interfaces. A series of startup dialogs is used to set up a
new game between players, each of which runs his own copy of the program.
When everything has been set up, all of them proceed to launch the game at
the same time.

So where does this leave cconq? Well, since it does not have the startup
dialogs, you cannot use it for network games, not even with other copies of
cconq. In fact, the -join command line option triggers a segfault in cconq.
The sdl interface cannot be used for network games for the same reason:
there are no startup dialogs in it yet.

Unfortunately, information about the obsolete -host and -join options is
still provided in the command line help,while information about the working
-r option (for xtconq) is missing. We should probably remove the -host and
-join options and all references to them, to prevent confusion. And add
some info about the -r option in xtconq instead.

Hans