<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=11533 >
> [dmarks - Sun Dec 02 06:40:47 2007]: > > > [wsimpson - Sun Jun 24 18:31:37 2007]: > > > > While searching for color reports, found these two and linked > them.... > > > > http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=2771 > > > > I'm replying on the more recent one, currently client-gtk-2.0, the > older is > > currently client (generic). > > > > Surely, it's time to resolve this very old issue? > > > > > > > > I agree. IIRC, warclient has this feature, so we could take a look at > their > implementation. Since their development is very multiplayer-centric, > they might > have an efficient solution. > > ~Daniel > > If by efficient you mean "gratuitously overdone", then yes, we have the solution for you :) (I speak only about coloring in the chatline; coloring in the "Messages" window might be nice too, and rather more easily done, but nobody ever felt the need for it. Thus when I refer to "messages" below, I mean chat messages). The only good point about my implementation is that if you have the brain to understand it, you can make it do whatever you want. Obviously this is no good for users that are not also avid programmers (you can take a look at the monstrosity in client/gui-gtk2.0/chatline.c; it is after the chat-link code, which is rather bloated in itself, but that is mostly due to the gtk api). The problem with doing client-side coloring based on pattern matching for anything other than trivial check-the-first-character type methods is that changes in server messages or servers running in different locales potentially break the patterns (and the user has to then annoyingly change/add patterns). Thus an alternative is to have the server colorize the messages, e.g. in the manner of IRC or certain FPS games: use an escape character followed by one or two numbers that indicate that the following text should be colored accordingly. To avoid exposing poor, older version freeciv users to messages besprinkled with ugly escape sequences, the server can strip them away right before sending based on a capability e.g. "chatcolors". Unforunately this solution removes all control from the users; they have to take what the server gives, and like it! So it seems a simple solution that makes everyone happy is not so obvious. I suggest that in addition to giving clients the capability to colorize messages based on escape sequences, the server should send additional information with chat messages indicating what the message is about (similar to IRC messages codes) that the client can then use, along with some configurable regular expression rules (a toned-down more efficient version of my "tag patterns" code), to transform messages as desired. Or you could just embed lua in the client too and have hooks to do chat coloring :). Well, those are just some ideas. Take what you will... book _______________________________________________ Freeciv-dev mailing list Freeciv-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/freeciv-dev
