IsHumanPlayer() in Multiplayer

[mapfi]

The question has been raised before (here: http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...threadid=62653)

Does the function IsHumanPlayer work properly in multiplayer games?

I did some testing tonight and here's what I found... (warning bad news!)

The one and only time the function would work in my setup was when it was a human player's turn (host or not) and the argument tested was his player number. No other player number would work when a human played and neither would it run on the AI's turns but there not even with the AI's player number as an argument.
The error returned is always "_IsHumanPlayer: Wrong number of arguments"
I can only think of some mistake in the code of the function itself which obviously renders it useless for any MP setup then...

[Martin Gühmann]

What was the exact code mapfi and did you tested it with DebugSlic=Yes?

-Martin

[mapfi]

hm, that was a while ago already... I just wrote something for testing, like a BeginTurn handler that would give me the result of is humanplayer in a message box.

[Martin Gühmann]

So it would be something like this (if I use the information from your first post):

HandleEvent(BeginTurn)'Test_IsHumanPlayer'post{
    if(IsHumanPlayer(1)){
         //Do something here
    }
}

This could be a little bit problematic, because players and ints are not the same thing, in the slic documentation you find this:

player.owner - An integer version of the player.

This is a hint that ints and players are not identical, but obviously we have a lot of implecit typecasts here in slic, but unfortunatly they fail sometimes. And other functions expects a integer representaion of the player as argument.

I think something like this should work:

HandleEvent(BeginTurn)'Test_IsHumanPlayer'post{
    if(IsHumanPlayer(player[0])){
         //Do something here
    }
}

Also this could work:

HandleEvent(BeginTurn)'Test_IsHumanPlayer'post{
    player[0] = 1;
    if(IsHumanPlayer(player[0])){
         //Do something here
    }
}

And this should also work:

HandleEvent(BeginTurn)'Test_IsHumanPlayer'post{
    if(IsHumanPlayer(g.player)){
         //Do something here
    }
}

In frenzy we have the problem that ints and players treated as the same thing. Most of the frenzy arguments for the IsHumanPlayer function are integers and not players.

-Martin

[mapfi]

I honestly can't remember - I would think I did something like

HandleEvent(BeginTurn) {
for (i = 1; i <= Num; i = i + 1) {
	player[0] = i;
	result[i] = IsHumanPlayer(player[0]);
	}
message(g.player, 'test');
}

but I wouldn't be able to swear on this... someone will have to try again, sorry

[Martin Gühmann]

Well this code will work as you described. Whenever the BeginTurn event is called a message is send to the current player (that's g.player) and no other player will recieve the message. In theory the result array should contain a lot of zeros and ones, but so far I don't see what do you want to do with the result array.

A code that could test it would be something like this:

HandleEvent(BeginTurn)'Test_IsHumanPlayer'post{
     if(IsHumanPlayer(player[0])){
           Message(1, 'Test_IsHumanPlayer');
     }
     else{
           Message(1, 'Test_IsNotHumanPlayer');
     }
}

So if you are player 1 then you will receive a buch of messages, as much as human players are in the game, and you should get as much messages as AI players are in the game.

-Martin