[crossfire] requestable spell lists.

[Mark Wedel]

Brendan Lally wrote:
> On 1/6/06, Mark Wedel <mwedel at sonic.net> wrote:
>>   All looks good - just a one minor question:
>>
>>> +       <name> (1 (non-zero) length byte, followed by that many bytes
>>> of ascii text)
>>> +               This is the name of the spell, and should be sent to the server
>>> +               in order to cast/invoke it.
>>> +
>>> +       <display name> (1 length byte (which may be zero) followed by that
>>> +               many bytes of ascii text)
>>> +               This is the name to display to the player regarding the spell.
>>> +               If length is zero, then the <name> should be used instead.
>>   Just curious what these these two names are far.  As far as I know right now,
>> each spell only has one name, so not sure why there are two.
> 
> gros wanted a way to do it, I think the reasoning was that there could
> be the 'internal' name of the spell, and a more flavourful display
> name.
> 
> Currently I have it set up to send the name and then name_pl as the
> display name, but only if it is
> 1) present
> 2) different from name.
> 
> I could of course use a different field instead ('title' maybe?)

  Ok.  I wonder if we should just not worry about it until there is actually a 
case where it is used (unless there is something on the drawing board right 
now?)  As otherwise, we start going down the path of including all sorts of 
fields in all sorts of commands because they could be useful at some point - 
designing for that just becomes more complicated.

  In some sense, because it also comes down to what does the client do with this 
info?  Unless there is a clear idea where this info comes from and how it will 
be used, it just seems like we shouldn't include it until we know that point.

  Otherwise, I can see the client not doing the right thing with it, so when it 
does become time to actually use that info for some purpose, the client needs to 
be updated to use it.  At which point the question is - why not just wait until 
that point.

> 
>>   As an aside - it doesn't need to be part of this patch, but it might be nice
>> to have the cast/invoke command be able to tag a numeric value instead of string
>> name, eg:
>>
>>   cast 12345
>>
>>   Which casts the spell associated with tag 12345.  This provides a slightly
>> more efficient way of the client communicating to the server what spell to cast,
>> and also provides a fairly good optimized way for the server to find the spell
>> (doesn't have to worry about duplicates - just has to see if an item with that
>> tag exists in the inventory (of which there is already code that does it) and
>> verify it is of type spell.
> 
> This could be done quite easily, although to not break older clients,
> it would have to be the case that no spell names currently start with
> a number. I believe this is the case however.

  I believe that is the case also, and putting that in as rule would I think be 
fine.

> 
> one other point, should I send the face number (if there is one) too?

  I'd say yes - I'm not sure how many spells have good icons set, but I could 
see it as being nice for the client using the icons in pull down menus/whatever 
to denote the spells.