Nobody really paid attention to the lobby window, and it completely
missed its purpose. Most people don't even wait for companies to
show up, but just hit "New Company".
This in turn means people create a lot of unneeded companies, while
they "just want to watch the game" or join another company.
Instead, "Join Game" now just joins the game as spectators.
The idea is that if you query an older server that does not support
this packet yet, the client receives an error. The assumption was
that on every "illegal packet" the connection would be closed. This
turns out to be false.
Now CLIENT_GAME_INFO aligns with the old PACKET_CLIENT_NEWGRFS_CHECKED,
which does a pre-check (which fails), and an error is sent back
and the connection is closed.
This is not a nice solution, but it is the best we got.
This switch has been a pain for years. Often disabling broke
compilation, as no developer compiles OpenTTD without, neither do
any of our official binaries.
Additionaly, it has grown so hugely in our codebase, that it
clearly shows that the current solution was a poor one. 350+
instances of "#ifdef ENABLE_NETWORK" were in the code, of which
only ~30 in the networking code itself. The rest were all around
the code to do the right thing, from GUI to NewGRF.
A more proper solution would be to stub all the functions, and
make sure the rest of the code can simply assume network is
available. This was also partially done, and most variables were
correct if networking was disabled. Despite that, often the #ifdefs
were still used.
With the recent removal of DOS, there is also no platform anymore
which we support where networking isn't working out-of-the-box.
All in all, it is time to remove the ENABLE_NETWORK switch. No
replacement is planned, but if you feel we really need this option,
we welcome any Pull Request which implements this in a way that
doesn't crawl through the code like this diff shows we used to.
* Clients can't be starved from joining the game
* Clients will see the amount of clients actually waiting in front of them, instead of the amount of waiting clients in total