[CF-Devel] client issues

[Mark Wedel]

 I'm sorry if I'm sounding like a broken record, but always always always
include the relevant versions of the client and server.


Preston Crow wrote:
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      I've noticed several client issues:
     
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      There's a problem with squares with many items.  It's not as bad as it used
     
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      to be (the corrupted item list is a thing of the past), but there is still
     
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      a problem.  If you have a very large pile of items, it will cause the
     
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      client to disconnect.  Since it saves you on the same square, you can't
     
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      play that character again until the map resets.  I'm not sure what the
     
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      threshold is.  I also found that I was able to move to a square with a
     
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      bunch of unidentified items, and it didn't start disconnecting me until I
     
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      hit my macro key for all my identification skills (it disconnected when it
     
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      got to smithery, and most of the items were weapons).
     
     
 It would help to get a rough idea.  Are talking 100 items?  50 items?

 IS the disconnect because the server crashed, or is it purely a client issue?

 If you have access to the server, that also then means you have access to the
map causing troubles, which would be very valuable in debugging this.

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      If you are carrying two identical items, but only one is identified, and
     
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      you then identify the other item (using a skill, and possibly using a
     
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      spell--I haven't tested that), then the items merge.  This is to be
     
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      expected.  Unfortunately, the client leaves one of the old items in the
     
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      inventory.  There is no way to get rid of this phantom item, other than to
     
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      reset via a bed to reality.
     
     
 The items don't merge on identification - I just tried this.  Now they may
merge in some scenarios, but I need more information on what you are doing to do
this.

 IF you drop the newly identified item, and pick it up, they merge them but that
all seems to work properly.


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      There seems to be no way to control the behaviour of 'apply' on a
     
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      container.  It seems to ignore the flags.  Also, there are times when it
     
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      uses the wrong item.  For example "apply key ring" will ignore the ring and
     
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      try to apply a key if you have one.  I was trying to write a macro to open
     
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      my key ring, pull out a few keys, and then close it; if you can get that to
     
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      work, let me know.
     
     
 Containers are a  little odd in that they have 3 states (active, open,
closed).  I suppose apply -a could always move it to the open stage, and apply
-u always make it closed.

 As for the key ring - fixed in CVS:

server/c_object.c: Update the return value for some matches - they
   function was returning immediately when it got a match, but did not give
   them a high match value, so searching for 'key ring' used to return a
   match value of 6 or so on the key ring, but a 14 on a key.

 
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      There seems to be no way with the GTK client to close a container other
     
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      than to click on the close button.  It would be nice if there were a
     
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      keyboard-based method.
     
     
 I would think it shoudl work the same as the X11 client, which may not work
very well at all.

 I would also think that the apply command should work just as well.  There is
the problem with matching of names - ie, you can have several "The Luggage", and
there is no way to specify via apply that you want the second luggage.  Some of
this is because the ordering of the client and server are not the same.

 What will likely get done for 2.0 is the ability for players to re-name the
objects - this is a somewhat requested feature, and should not be too hard to
do.

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      There are several client commands that aren't documented.  Technically this
     
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      is a server issue.  Someone should take a few minutes and compare with
     
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      output of 'help commands' with the list of commands in the source.  Then
     
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      help text should be added for any command that doesn't have it.  This is
     
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      boring, but really necessary for the 1.0 release.
     
     
 Note that there are lots of commands listed which are really no worthy of
documentation or should not be shown to the player.

 For example, there is no reason most people should care about the archs, logs,
malloc, sstable, strings, and time.

 There are many others which are pretty self documenting (direction commands, or
ones that are already bound to keys and people pretty clearly know what they
mean.)

 The biggest issue might be that the 'help commands' shows all these other
commands, many of which are really debugging commands, but not really harmful
for other people to run.