On Fri, 19 May 2006, William Balcerski wrote:
> > I think adding a new feature to send 32 positions via short packets would be a
> > good idea.  I had been planning to do just that, when the netrek CVS went
> > down.
> >
> Suppose I should mention Netrek XP 2006 draws the new ship bitmaps to
> 255 positions :P  I'd prefer the actual p_dir be sent if possible, it's

Borg!  It's part of the game to figure out ship direction from ship motion.
Clued players will turn to the edge of the bitmap rotation so that they can
change direction faster than their enemies expect.  Why not just make a torp
aim borg?  blah blah  10 updates/sec is unfair!  blah blah color clients blah

Seriously, why only 255?  That means I can still one up you with 256 in the
next version of Paradise 2000.

> the most important piece of information (imo)  lacking in short packets.

What else is lacking, that a non-borg client can use?  I had a patch to add
armies dooshed by planets, but that's not in the old style protocol either.
Torp and plasma direction isn't sent, but a client can't use that.  I guess
there is speeds over 15.  Not something you have to worry about in a normal
game.

I think the easiest way to add more ship positions would be to append the data
to the end of the VPlayers packet.  Add the lower four bits for each player in
the vplayer packet, in order, to the end.  Just four bits per player extra
bandwidth.