[crossfire] draw_ext_info/message update/redo

[Mark Wedel]

Andrew Fuchs wrote:
> On 9/24/06, Mark Wedel <mwedel at sonic.net> wrote:
> ...
>> The main advantages I see of the drawextinfo is this:
>> - Support for the media tags (bold text, different fonts, etc).  I'd expect
>> these to be infrequently used, as in general the global tag/attribute should be
>> used.  But I think use in NPC messages giving clues what can be discussed with
>> them by doing bold or underline would be very good (we should probalby decide
>> what the form for that syntax highlighting it is, so that it is consistent
>> accross all the maps/NPCs)
> 
> Or we could make a new tag like "[triggerword]".  The server then
> could decide on it's formatting.  Also, if it is passed to the client,
> the client could make the hilighted phrase clickable.

  That could be reasonable.  However, I think that should just get passed to the 
client, and the client decides what to do with it, not the server.

  My general philosophy is to try to offload those decisions/that work to the 
client - in a sense, we should try not to hold preferences on the server unless 
they are a per character type of issue.

  And if passed to the client, it could of course make it clickable (just 
generated the appropriate say command).

  A possible interesting extension could be something like [img=sword.111] or 
the like.  The image itself being one of the images in the arch directory.  Then 
you actually could have pictures of monsters with the scroll that describes 
them, etc.

  And from a more complex level, you could actually have real maps to places, 
not the ascii maps.  The map would have to be put in the arch tree, and a the 
images collected, but that is certainly better than anything we have now.

> 
>> - Instead of the server telling the client the color to use and the client
>> blindly following it, the client now knows the type of messages.  So with some
>> extra logic, I could decide that I want the level gain message to be in a
>> specific font in bright green, even though the server says those should be in
>> red.  It would also allow for easier filtering (if chat/say/shout have their own
>> types, easier to have a conversation pane, etc).
> 
> Very useful in my opinion.  I really like the colors that "me chats: "
> uses.  Though that could be considered a bug.

  To me, the filter/font is less desirable than the filtering.  With this 
change, it will now be possible to really have a tab just for chat related 
messages, etc.  I think to actually be able to set colors/fonts, we may need to 
trim down the number of subtypes, and/or make some common values.