Small request : New command to bring up logs in game.

[Piker]

This is a small feature request to hopefully make life a little easier in game.

I enjoy doing quests, but i tend to complete them as and when i'm traveling to places. This in turn means i regularly forget what i'm doing in quests and need to refer to my chat logs. This involves me either loging out to read the logs, or attempting to access them while the PS client is running (This usually leads to me crashing as i run in full screen mode)

What i'm proposing is a /chatlog command that will bring up a window in game with the chat log contents. It may be necessary to add a modifier like [/chatlog Piker] so that you can bring up specific characters logs, for those of us with many

P.S. I did a quick search on this topic and came up with nothing similar (well in the first page or 2 anyway )

[Eriroley]

This idea has been bounced around in various incarnations for quite some time behind the scenes.

I will respectfully disagree with the in-game loading of another character's logs. While you might have the logs, and have easy access to them - That is strictly OOC, and I don't believe that that has a place being shown in-game.

On the other hand, your current character would know what was said to him/her/kra, and what he/she/kra said. so the idea has a lot of merit.

It might necessitate a change in how log-files are done, but that is probably doable

Thank you for your input.
 

P.S. I'd like to hear anybody else's thoughts on the matter

[Under the moon]

The problem is that this would not be greatly useful unless there was a search function to go along with it. I would not mind having it to use.

[bilbous]

I have a bit of trouble with this idea. It is not that I do not like it but I do not think it is very realistic. I do not remember the minutiae of conversation nor do I always remember every conversation. It would be good to have some kind of command similar to Linux's apropos and it should probably be restricted to npc dialog or even just their quest dialog. Thus if I am doing Harnquist's (made up) "magma iron" quest and I just noticed it is on my list months later I could /apropos "magma iron" and get a short summary of where I am in the quest -- last step completed -- and a few phrases from the dialog containing but not limited to the current directive, less most of the filler. The log files are not always that helpful anyways as they may span several computers or get lost in other ways.

This might not be feasible.

[Suno_Regin]

It doesn't really matter if it's realistic or not, because if you're a decent roleplayer, you won't have your character use the knowledge you gained from the logs in an IC situation. For questing, does it really matter? All quests, as I see it, are OOC, since a BD guard (or some other NPC), wouldn't have to have everyone solve the same riddle when someone already solved it for him in the past. They're just there to give you the reward, so using OOC knowledge in them wouldn't necessarily hurt anything.

[Eriroley]

as a possibility: what would people think of having, say, the last 10 lines of NPC chat auto-load into the npc window when you first log in?

that way you still see the last few things that were said, so you know where you are in a quest if either you or the server goes down, but you don't have "ancient memories"
 

[Caarrie]

as a possibility: what would people think of having, say, the last 10 lines of NPC chat auto-load into the npc window when you first log in?

only problem i see is that some npc chat is not from quests or even asked for [the distance messages] so if you are around npcs a lot for rp you might find that when you relog all you get in that tab is a bunch of messages that have nothing to do with anything, and some people just talk to npcs to learn about the game and the settings so that has no impact on quests for the most part, if this were to be added [and i think it is hard to do] there should be an on/off toggle for it and a setting for how many lines are sent back on relog.

[Dajoji]

Perhaps a feature could be added to the Quest window so that just like we can swap Events/Quests, we could swap Notes and Quest Logs. This way, by selecting a quest and clicking on Logs, we can browse through the npc dialogs related to it.

Not sure how complicated this would be to implement but might be easier than dropping all of one's logs in the communications window. Just a thought.

[neko kyouran]

Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion handles the quest tracking concept you speak of quite efficiently Dajoji, not sure if you have ever played around in that game though.

It essentially has a list of all quests the character is currently on, with the last entry info listed under the quest title to give a brief over view of where the character left off on that particular quest.  The player also has the ability to click on that overview, which then brings up the entire quest history from the beginning to that point in the quest so they can go back and re-read the entirety of what they have done so far in the quest. 

To do something like that efficiently in PS though, would take a little overhaul of how character quests are stored in the DB.  That being, a way to have all quest dialog for all possible quests for each character must be developed, but then simply have each bit of dialog for each quest have a show/hide flag per each character, and when the character does the required activity that displays the next dialog in the quest chain, that flag also gets updated from hide to show.  Then, its a simple query on the db for show all dialog for (insert main quest title here) where (dialog flag name = show for when the player wants to pull up the chat history about that quest they are on.

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My thoughts on this subject was that a separate window could be created that would simply pull up the last 50-100 lines of conversation that character has had since last login.  That way the player can get a refresher of what happened last time they logged in, and if they really need to know more, they can always refer to their saved log file.

[bilbous]

I think what might be more useful ... going from the discussion leaving my previous thoughts behind ... would be to separate the log files by tab of origin. That way it would be a lot easier to leaf through the npc dialogs to get what you need. Having all the text saved to the same log makes for large logs with frequently useless filler that needs to be scrolled past. It should then be fairly simple to build a search function, some wrapper script to grep for example. Perhaps that would entail GPL entanglements that are not desired.

[Vornne]

Well, I had a go at this... there was no problem reading the file and showing it in a window, getting the gui looking kinda ok took most of my time

I have not done any find/sorting functions yet, they may be a bit harder...

I wondered if I should update the log window as you play... refreshing from the whole file makes the client freeze for a bit with long logs, I think because of the type of list box (seemed to happen with just the SetText() function with the data in memory).

So I thought about making it another tab in the chat window, called "history" or something. And adding the most recent text to the chat tab on startup is no problem, but I don't think filtering out npc text is possible unless the way it is logged is changed, there is no difference to player talk. Bilbous, do you mean sorted by login? That might be doable somehow, but a tab each... well I've logged in far to many times to fit on anybodies screen

But meh, I think I like having a separate big log window. Anybody else with more bright ideas?

[bilbous]

I was thinking that exchanges with npcs could be logged separately from exchanges with people and from guild or tell or group and status messages. So if you are typing on the npc tab it would be logged in bilbous-npc.log, if you are using tells - bilbous-tell.log. Sure it will increase the number of log files but I do not see that as much of a problem. It would make searching easier even without any in-game access. As far as having a tab for each log for your search function ... no ... maybe a radio button to indicate which log to search or maybe a separate input box in the ui to search the currently selected tabs associated log.

As far as difference to player talk goes all speech directed at npcs is prefaced with the sometimes invisible /tellnpc, as far as I can tell, general conversation with /say and similarly /tell, /group, etc. The server can tell if the speaker is an npc or a player so it should not be too hard to direct the logging.

So yes I am proposing a change in the logging procedure and have no idea how difficult it may be. I always have been more of a thinker than a doer. One of these days I am going to get around to downloading the source and trying to wrap my head around it, Today, however, my head already hurts.

[Mordraugion]

over 2 years and just the kind of task for a prospect?

http://www.hydlaa.com/bugtracker/bug.php?op=show&bugid=1184&pos=0

[Piker]

Thanks for the replys.

Some good ideas i hadn't thought of.

My idea was just a basic window with an info dump from the logs. As for a search function, well i personaly could live without it, but i can see where it would be really handy. It sounds a pain though to make changes to the way log files are handled and to code for that matter. That wasn't my intention, i don't need a bad conscience thinking about the extra workload for the Devs this would involve