[Jcrossclient-devel] new to the project

[Jamie J. <but...@ho...>]

Hi Java fans!  ;-)  I don't know all that much about Java, but I'm enjoying 
Crossfire so far, and have only tried the 1.3 and 1.4 alphas of the 
jcrossclient yet (and the GTK client, briefly; it ran my Win98 PC out of 
resources in a short time so I stopped playing with that).  Hoping I can 
help with testing, documentation, or whatever.

OK, major issues I've found so far:

1- The sourceforge pages aren't intuitive to me.  In fact the whole CF 
"presence" on the web seems pretty slipshod, although just about everything 
exists *somewhere*; I guess that's probably par for the course when there's 
no big company shelling out $$$$ and cracking whips, huh?  :-I  Anyway it 
would be nice to make the pages a little easier to navigate.  I can spend 
some time detailing my thoughts on that if anyone is inclined to do anything 
about it.

2- The 1.3 and 1.4 clients both "run out of buffer space" (my wording for my 
impression of the problem) while playing.  I can play for a while, and then 
the right-side window has a problem where no new text is added, but the 
existing text flashes whenever some new text *should* be added.  So it looks 
like things are happening fine on the server end but the client is somehow 
unable to process any new info.  (The other windows continue working 
normally.)  I think this is byte-count related, not time-related, so it 
should be easy to test by going into a store and doing repeated inventory 
printouts for a few minutes to cram the buffer full.

My workaround is to close the client and restart it.  This evidently resets 
whatever the problem is.

3- In 1.3, I could see my armor class and other stats while equipping and 
unequipping new items; in 1.4 I have to equip/unequip, change tabs to see 
stats, then change back.  Given that the map window is no larger in 1.4 than 
it is in 1.3, why not leave the stats window where it was?  The screen real 
estate is unused in 1.4.

4- Is there (or can there be) a way to resize the windows within the 
applet??  I'd sure like to do that.  This would especially help when trying 
to read long chat messages.

5- I'm sure you already know the scrolling in the 2 leftern windows is still 
funky (still requires manual resize of application window to kick-start the 
scrolling any time the current "awareness" of potential list length is 
exceeded).

6- Only the 1st and last Debug menu options appear enabled.  The other 3 do 
nothing AFAICS.

7- Sometimes the map window, or other windows, can get desynched (or 
something like that) and not show the current information.  Workaround is 
again to just restart the whole app.  Disconnect/reconnect might work too, 
but I've found that it sometimes won't where restart will, so I just always 
restart.  :-P

8- "bind" command seems unusable to me.  Any time I try to follow the 
directions, I type in "bind blahblah" (without the quotes of course) and hit 
enter, and it says "[See settings menu for keybindings]", then returns my 
cursor to the typing box.  When I hit my key to which I want to bind 
blahblah, it does nothing (except print that character in the typing box, if 
possible, or give an error if not); if I then hit enter it complains that I 
gave it an unbound command.  :-(

9- Without bind, I have no way to do some things efficiently.  I'd like to 
have a key set up to pick up *all* items at current location, but I don't 
know how to do that.

10- Pickup mode 7 picks up all coins while running, but when not running, it 
just picks up 1.  This may be a server issue, or maybe I just don't 
understand the rules of pickup mode 7 yet.  (I haven't tried the other 
modes.)  Also, it would be GREAT to be able to set up a detailed list of 
items desired, but that is probably a purely server-side addition, and may 
never happen (tho I notice something like this is in the GTK client).  Oh 
well, I can dream.  :-)

I'll stop there.  10 should be enough for now, LOL.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“The information in this film is something everybody has to know.”
--Nick Nolte, on Aaron Russo's "America: From Freedom to Fascism, Volume 
One" (www.freedomtofascism.com)