> Care to share your findings? How many players clients have you checked and
> during what period of time have you done this?
>
> It doesn't work on continuum anymore, so where have you done this?
Sending 5 spaces to all board still works to get client info from all
players.  Right off the bat, 75% of players use Netrek XP or Netrek XP
Mod, which has 32 pos bitmaps.  Current COW and Paradise users also have
32 pos bitmaps.

Current game on continuum:
12 Netrek XP or XP Mod
3 Netrek XP 2006
1 Netrek 1999
3 Paradise 2000rc5
1 Paradise/Tedturner 1.3.1
1 COW 2.02
2 COW 2.10

32 view pixmaps were put in COW as of 3.00, so those 3 players don't have
em, But if they used the latest version of their client, they would as well.
Same for the 1 Tedturner user (the lastest version of Paradise has em).
The other 19 users have the 32 pixmap sets.

> I strongly disagree. Between 16 and 32 there's "only" twice as many
> positions. In the 16 position setup there's four positions in a 90 degree
> turn, in 32 there's eight. That's a big noticable difference, but with 256
> positions there's an amazing 64 positions in a 90 degree turn, so with 256
> positions the ship moves virtually seemless, so all the position fake
> moves are useless. So anyone playing with a client that has 256 ship
> position is unaffected by the, very difficult, position fake move.

In a dogfight you can't turn to the degree, maybe if you are a borg but no
one is that good ;P.  I've played with the client in both 32 position mode
and 256 position mode, I really don't notice the difference in combat.
It's more noticeable during orbiting, or when you are going at high warp.

> One might argue (which you are not) that it's so much prettier with 256
> ship positions and that it's okay to have clients with that many ship
> positions just because it makes the game prettier and therefore draws more
> people, like when we went from 5 to 10 updates per second (which really
> screwed with dogfighting and made it a lot easier for poor dogfighters).
> That's a more legitimate argument, and if that's the way the developers
> want the game to go it's an easy call to make.
>
Thought about using that argument but it didn't address the concern you
brought up.  But yes that's the way I'd like to go, I want to make the
client look better, that includes smoother ship turning, higher resolution
bitmaps, larger tactical window, etc.