Re: [Jcrossclient-devel] new to the project

[Brendan L. <bre...@gm...>]

Apologies for the delay responding to this, I have been far to
distracted with other non-crossfire related things recently.

On 8/3/06, Jamie Jackson <but...@ho...> wrote:
>
> 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.

Most of the crossfire web stuff is dealt with by leaf, he maintains
the main cf website and various other things around it. Best ways to
contact him are either through the main cf mailing list, #crossfire on
freenode, or the cfmb (forum.metalforge.net)

> 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.

I'm still not entirely sure what causes this, in any case, the text
window code probably needs to be rewritten sooner or later to support
coloured text

> 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.

The main motivation for switching to a tabbed interface was to allow
more controls without having an unusably cluttered interface, there
are different issues brought up with doing that, and the inventory
equipment one is one of the main ones.

I think ideally, I would have some kind of seperate equipment screen,
which would take over the map view so that the stats would stay at the
side. This is rather complicated with the current protocol though.

> 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.

It's pretty complicated with AWT, I'll probably move to swing
eventually, but don't really know it well enough yet to avoid
substantial breakage for quite a minor gain (and I'm kinda hoping that
everyone with standardise on SWT first anyway)

> 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).

Yes, I should probably do a workaround for that, I'm not quite sure
what the best way to approach it is though.

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

Debug mode only has an effect if you run from a text mode window, the
other two are probably broken (the map code has had some substantial
rewriting to it).

> 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

I know there is an issue when the playerID changes, any map de-sync
should fix itself on a map change though.

> 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.  :-(

bind is a client side command in cfclient/gcfclient, not a server
command, as such for it to work I would have to implement client-side
support for it (which I haven't done yet, and am not entirely sure
there is a nicely portable way to do so)

Arguably the server referencing the client side 'bind' command is a
server instruction bug (and, by extension, so are all the
left/right/middle click instructions given by the server) however,
there is no nice way for the server to understand how the client
behaves, so I don't really see a way around this.

> 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.

there isn't really a nice way, I'm not entirely happy with the item
manipulation interface at the moment anyway, I'm just unsure what a
better one would look like.

> 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.  :-)

pickupmode is server side, if there is an issue with the behaviour
changing when running, then I don't see how it can be anything but a
server issue. (although it certainly sounds quite weird).

Are you thinking of the newpickupmode? This alllows setting categories
of things to pickup, but not give too much detail. There is also the
search-items command, which allows matching on substrings in item
names at the cost of a substantial speed penalty.

In principle newpickup mode can be used directly, by sending a long
numeric string to the server, in practice, I need to get a working
graphical interface to it.

I'm hoping to get that last done in the next week, while I am on
holiday, I normally seem to be more productive when I am hundreds of
yards away from the next nearest person.

Brendan.