[CF-Devel] Re: Repeated line supression for the gtk client.

[crossfire-devel-admin at archives.real-time.com]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 10:02:37PM -0700, Mark Wedel wrote:
>
     
        However, a bigger level, I consider the patch superfluous.  The server already 
     
     >
     
      does message collapsing.  There are many places where messages are not being 
     
     >
     
      properly reduced, but that is a pretty trivial change to the server (just remove 
     
     >
     
      the NDI_UNIQUE tag from the message).
     
     
I've never liked the way the server does message collapsing right works
now, from a playing point of view.
First of all "1 times You pray". The "1 times" should be removed,
probably an easy fix, it looks really ugly. Then the annoying time
delay until you see the first message makes one think the server is
lagging, the key binding doesn't work or something. It can of course
be made smaller by changing the default value, but then it collapses
fewer messages. A better fix would be to send the first collapsable
message immediatly, then start to collapse it.
Thirdly, it doesn't work when you mix two messages, does it?  Like:
"1 times The ball of lightning zaps dragon"
"1 times The ball of lightning electrocutes dragon"
"1 times The ball of lightning zaps dragon"
"1 times The ball of lightning electrocutes dragon"

After playing some more with my patch, I changed my patch to move
the collapsed lines down to the bottom again so the latest message is
always closest to the bottom. It is usually easier to read when there
are not too many different messages comming in (like the usual case for
low level characters).

If one looks at it from a system point of view, the messages should be
collapsed on the server to save bandwidth. But the server can't (yet)
update old messages in the client and that is needed if one wants more
info to fit on the screen (like the ball lightning example). The best
thing is probably to combine output-sync with my patch (if gtk was
working that is). The "X times" could be removed in the client and then
my new patch could further collapse the messages. Even better would be
a way for the server to send a shorter message, telling which message
was repeated and let the client repeat it, but I don't know if the few
bytes it would save (and further client/server complication) would be
worth it.

Regards,
/Sebastian

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