Updates in Metaserver

[FreeWilly]

The developers have given a lot of energy into online multiplayer gaming, though I still have to get the chance to observe a running game beyond 4000 BC.
Nevertheless some small enhancements might be beneficial for the surface.

1) Server Overview: Add a column "round" or "year" with the current data from the game, if such a thing is possible! This eases understanding of the current situation of the running (or stalling) game.

2) Server Overview: Add a column "online" which counts the currently connected players or observers. Rationale: The current column "human" is confusing. Does it mean how many players are set up to be human, how many have ever been human (but might have returned to AI again) or how many are current human online players? If you want to be meticulous, you can choose from the following columns "players", "designed to be human", "online human (players)" and "online observers".

3) Server Overview: You could add colors to the lines listing games. E.g. green for preparation, blue for running game with online players, orange for running game without human players (stalled) and red for terminated games.

4) Server Overview: Give some info about the dimensioning of the map of a game.

[Ozor Mox]

All good suggestions and actually I posted about number 2 before here. I think this is the most important as a player connecting to a game that reports more than zero "humans" connected in the metaserver list has no obvious way of telling that there are actually no clients connected to the server, probably resulting in them chatting to no one, thinking they are being ignored and quitting, perhaps putting them off multiplayer Freeciv.

[ifaesfu]

I see some servers show the correct number of human players. It was the case with Davide's "freeciv-debian" servers and it is now with xavier's "freeciv.nmte.ch". However, some servers, like gs.pardus.at, show a number of human players when maybe there isn't any of them.

[cazfi]

At least davide's servers used to send updates to the metaserver more frequently than stock freeciv servers, which have refresh interval of 3 minutes.