#30 Non-essential data communication

[Nigel Phillips]

There is no mechanism to communicate non-essential (to
the running of the simulation) data - e.g. pictures,
scenario details, etc.

[Nigel Phillips]

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There might be quite a lot of data that needs to be
communicated, depending on the game type. e.g. Red Alert
style games would need to know of changes to resource
levels. So we need a flexible, extensible, data
communication system.

[Nigel Phillips]

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See also 428331.

[Nigel Phillips]

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Pictures: how to communicate?
If standard pics (included w. distribution), how to specify
path name in install independent fashion?
Otherwise, use of URL will require a web/ftp server
somewhere... not nice.

Could read as a byte-array from a file and communicate that?
(See javax.swing.ImageIcon)

[Nigel Phillips]

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This might well be better done as a request/response style
server, because this type of data is (by necessity)
optional... the server doesn't know what data the client
will need (the AI clients will generally need less than the
users).

But then I don't want to implement a generic file-server.
There's enough of those already. Just use URLs? (This would
allow off-loading of some data transfer to other systems.)

[Nigel Phillips]

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java.awt.Toolkit get/createImage(String filename) allows
relative path names. But relative to what?