Crossfire Forum

There seem to be a lot of different text widths on multiline messages from the server. It would be better if they were only broken after each paragraph and the client does some proper wordwrapping on the text. That would make it easier to read and one would have to see cycles of full/half lines when the message area is too narrow.

This has been annoying me for some time, too

I agree that it would be better if the server sent texts as a big chunk leaving wordwrapping to the client. To yield that I think either the maps should be changed or the server, so that it combines the lines between "msg" and "endmsg". However, I fear that it could create a possibility for buffer overflow on the client side.. and backwards combatibility is something to be preserved, right?

Can we hear a programmer's opinion of the problem?

hoxu wrote:Can we hear a programmer's opinion of the problem?

I've not coded anything on crossfire (or gtk), but I took a quick peek at the code yesterday. The 1.4 client seems (at a glance) only able to handle 256 bytes long protocol messages (it seems simple to change). There will not be a buffer overflow, but the client will get an error (and disconnect?). The protocol is good for up to 32k (or 64k?) long messages.

Messages are normaly not sent with a newline at the end of the message, so it is not possible to notice the difference between two messages that are there because they are different paragraphs or because they are of two lines. It might be a good idea to just change the client at first (it won't look so much worse than today), then wait with the update to the server (and maps!) until other protocol changes require an update to the client.

Speaking of messages. I added a very simple hack to the client. If the new message was the same as the old message, don't display it. No more thousends of messages about praying/meditating or ball lightnings missing titans... If I knew GTK better, perhaps it would be possible to erase the old message and add a new message proceded by a counter to tell how often the message has been repeated:
(409) You pray to Ruggilli

From there, there should be some way to have a list of the last 5-10 text lines and change them in the same way...
(13) You miss Titan
(9) You skillfully hit Titan
(409) Your ball_lightning misses Titan

etc.