Re: refactoring of servermenu object and sorting by server ping times

[brlcad <br...@ma...>]

Mike,

Sounds like a great idea.  Ultimately, it would be nice to be able to 
sort on a variety of fields, but ping time and player counts are by far 
the most useful.  Sorting by country/continent would also be neat, if 
only mildly useful for knowing where a server lives.

There's probably a need for a HUDMenu class as this point that wraps 
the menu navigation better than the current manual HUDDialog linking 
for all of the menus.  Regardless and back to your point, the refactor 
plan sounds reasonable enough.  That menu in particular is logic and 
data intensive enough to warrant being separated out into a data object 
so that multiple views are not so difficult.  If you can, I'd recommend 
making that data object be HUDDialog and menu agnostic so that it 
really is just a data container that can be poked for info.  Perhaps a 
generic ListServer object that knows how to talk to the list server and 
servers and stash the appropriate info.  I think that's basically what 
you said in not so many words..

By the way, in case you don't know, most all of the devs hang out in 
#bzflag on irc.freenode.net.  If you've never used IRC, it's pretty 
simple -- http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/ircprimer.html is a decent 
intro.  Basically it's like an instant message client on steroids 
intended for large group communication.

You'll find a variety of devs in #bzflag willing to help you out if you 
have any questions with varying degrees of code familiarity.  Take the 
advice you hear with a grain of salt -- if one of the devs disagrees, 
it's likely you'll find another that will agree. ;)  Relatively fun and 
friendly bunch once you get to know everyone regardless.

Cheers!
Sean aka brlcad aka learner

p.s. Any new data class should get shoved into src/game/ instead of 
src/bzflag/.  There's the beginnings of a game engine are being put 
together so that the server and client can coordinate logic better.  
Also, you should be working on cvs head, not 1.10.6 sources, if you 
can.

On May 26, 2004, at 8:45 AM, mdavis_mailbox wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I want to add a feature to the bzflag client that allows a person to 
> sort the
> server list by ping time. This seems fairly reasonable, but after 
> digging
> through the code I feel that it might be better to first refactor the 
> servermenu
> object into the menu (view) and another object (network/list 
> controller).
>
> Once this is done, I can add the server ping time code and then us
> bandwidth starved South Africans can tell which server is going to let 
> us play
> :-)
>
> Would anyone object to me doing this?
>
> Thanks
> Mike Davis