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` is the default to open the console.. bad idea imo.
Besides, why change something thats working fine and is similar to other games? well maybe it could be changed from ^x to ^c to be more similar to quake4.. but why change it even further?

Q4 doesn't use hex...

and better not change it at all now. This is too late, the patch is in, changing it will annoy quite many people now.

You should have thought about this before. Yes, in retrospect, had I known that Q4 uses ^cRGB dec, I'd have suggested you to do the same. Now it's too late, and we are using ^xRGB hex. It's a bit more flexible than ^cRGB, so it even is better.

And no, the ` character is used to open the console on US keyboards, can't use that one.

BTW, Terence, have you tried to give the qstat patch to the qstat people?

and better not change it at all now. This is too late, the patch is in, changing it will annoy quite many people now.

Since it's not in 2.5 but in SVN, I think IMO it's never too late to change it...
and everyone can change easily the name (assuming that ppl is not so stupid) watching the tags generated by the color picker. I see no problem.

Maybe the ? is the ideal char, coz it's used at the end of interrogative statements always followed by a space. If you forget to put a space... you stupid!

Don't.

? is used in wildcard expressions, like

ls maps/basement.???

Some other places support these expressions too. Don't break them by displaying this as ??.

Now, going through the whole ascii set:

! - used by QC code, REALLY should not have a special meaning for display. Example: "Assertion failed: !baa"

" - quotation mark. Don't even dare touching this.

# - used in "target" of items. Can appear in prvm_edicts dumps. So better don't make this show up wrong.

$ - variable expansio

% - used in say escapes (although they now also support \ in %'s place)

& - we had that. Can be in nick names and would make sense.

', (, ) - used in properly spelled English.

* - used in wildcard expressions, and at the start of some texture names in Quake

+ - used in mathematical expressions

,, -, ., /, :, ;, - regular punctuation

<, =, > - used in mathematical expressions

? - regular punctuation, and wildcards

@ - email addresses

[, ] - common in clan tags

\ - escape char for say escapes and \n

^ - color code character

_ - often used in variable names and entity classnames, don't touch

` - toggleconsole char on some keyboards

{, } - common in community tags

| - indeed, mostly unused, but |aaa for a color would look extremely weird. Some clans IIRC use it.

~ - toggleconsole char on some keyboards

By the way: these were all there are in ASCII. Don't block another char for color codes.

terencehill wrote:

and better not change it at all now. This is too late, the patch is in, changing it will annoy quite many people now.

Since it's not in 2.5 but in SVN, I think IMO it's never too late to change it...

Such changes need LOTS of testing, and rewriting lots of handling code for existing color codes (like in rcon2irc). Also, lots of debugging and bugfixing was needed for your last color codes patch. Don't want to do this all over again.

Also, we have a release date in the near future. Don't do such a thing as "last minute commit" to break the release. We had that too often already.

What about control chars? Can they be used?

Most are special characters for use in nicknames, and players got attached to them. However, as they can't be TYPED IN, they're automatically bad. Color codes must be typable on the console.

Heck, forget it. Won't happen anyway. We have a release date set and don't want to get lots of stress for a stupid change like this one. It WORKS, so why change it and break lots of other stuff along the way?

Cause as Terence said, it's STILL svn so if he could make it better it's last chance.

Alien wrote:Cause as Terence said, it's STILL svn so if he could make it better it's last chance.

And as divVerent said, this is how things break. Removing the x is just a nitpick -- I've seen players with plenty of color in their names. DivVerent's wasted too much time explaining the complications.

I'm not saying terencehill should quit on this, just don't rush it for this release.

The last possibilty was ? but if div says it's not usable, for me it's ok. It gave me a reason. But at least now I'm sure that a BETTER way (since 1 char is better than one, it's not a niptick) is not practicable. Close.

The ctrl-key thing it's not a nice way coz u can't write it as text in a file.

Talking about the name, the only way to use more rgb colors on the name could be to raise up its lenght (now is 64)...
But I don't know if it's possible and, if yes, how much changes and how many bug tests it will require.
Let's see what div says

mmm... wait... I've just thought that maybe a conversion on the fly of the rgb tags in ^number (while possible) when changing the name could be a little help on this...
Just yesterday Draahkellian had to change manually 3 rgb tags with their relative value in ^num to fit 64 chars.

It's f&$^%#& svn, therefore it's not OFFICIAL. Things should break in svn cause it's meant for that. Or should there be svn for svn or what?

You can write ctrl+thing in a file (depends on what input os uses for entering non-keyboard (extended ascii, unicode symbols) chars). Those might be displayed as faces, arrows, card symbols or using specified notation.

Alien wrote:It's f&$^%#& svn, therefore it's not OFFICIAL. Things should break in svn cause it's meant for that. Or should there be svn for svn or what?

You can write ctrl+thing in a file (depends on what input os uses for entering non-keyboard (extended ascii, unicode symbols) chars). Those might be displayed as faces, arrows, card symbols or using specified notation.

It seems you didn't understand the "we have a release date set" fragment on div0's post. In the meantime we can discuss how/if to make it just a little better. I'm a little interested on the possible bandwidth save, I hope to come back with some ideas later.

Alien: please read that post again: We are close to a release, THIS IS THE WRONG TIME to break stuff. Besides entering ^ into a config file is easy on all OSs while ctrl is potentially not!

Alien wrote:It's f&$^%#& svn, therefore it's not OFFICIAL. Things should break in svn cause it's meant for that. Or should there be svn for svn or what?

Stop being an asshole. The devs, including Div0, are trying to put together a release. SVN needs to be tested for a few days for them to successfuly do this. Why do you need to argue with them when they're trying to make a release (and thus bring more people to our nice game with said release)?

Alien wrote:It's f&$^%#& svn, therefore it's not OFFICIAL. Things should break in svn cause it's meant for that. Or should there be svn for svn or what?

You can write ctrl+thing in a file (depends on what input os uses for entering non-keyboard (extended ascii, unicode symbols) chars). Those might be displayed as faces, arrows, card symbols or using specified notation.

Tell me how you do this in Notepad.

terencehill wrote:Talking about the name, the only way to use more rgb colors on the name could be to raise up its lenght (now is 64)...
But I don't know if it's possible and, if yes, how much changes and how many bug tests it will require.

More characters would be easily possible, but then DarkPlaces client are likely to crash other Quake engine servers when connecting to them. Older DarkPlaces servers would simply cut off the name, that'd be fine, but then DarkPlaces would crash poorly written servers that the Quake community actually USES, like mvdsv.

divVerent wrote:

Alien wrote:It's f&$^%#& svn, therefore it's not OFFICIAL. Things should break in svn cause it's meant for that. Or should there be svn for svn or what?

You can write ctrl+thing in a file (depends on what input os uses for entering non-keyboard (extended ascii, unicode symbols) chars). Those might be displayed as faces, arrows, card symbols or using specified notation.

Tell me how you do this in Notepad.

alt+num lock numbers. Won't work with regular ones. You could use windows key in kde/gnome.

That won't enter control characters (0 to 31), just "high" characters (code 128 and above).

Actually, you're falling for a lie by Microsoft

Alt-1, Alt-2, ..., Alt-31 do enter characters that LOOK like the control character signs in the VGA charset. When you save the file, they'll get converted to question marks. If you read the message when saving, you'll see why: these signs aren't actual control characters, but lookalikes from Unicode. They can be loaded back if you save as UTF-8, but DarkPlaces does not support UTF-8 as of now.

This lie is as old as Windows 3.1, though: Alt-digits... enters characters from the DOS code page, and get translated to Windows's charset. To get ACTUAL character codes, you have to prefix the number with a leading zero. E.g. Alt-010 will enter an ACTUAL line feed. However, Notepad doesn't insert these characters literally, but executes their associated commands. E.g. Alt-01 does NOTHING in Notepad, and Alt-08 deletes the last character, instead of entering a literal backspace character.

Ok, it seems notepad is cheating. At least it can almost correctly save in unicode not like wordpad. We can still use 8859-1 extension in that case.

Again, there is no TIME to change that. Forget it. There isn't even any USE in it. Increasing the name length, however, is easy: MAX_SCOREBOARDNAME can be increased without any large problems (but would annoy people who host mvdsv Quake servers). With some extra work, it could be increased for GAME_NEXUIZ only by doing if checks where it occurs. Anyone volunteer to do such a patch?

Instead of raising up MAX_SCOREBOARDNAME, could be a practicable solution to add another field: longname with a higher char limit, keeping the name?
I don't know the implications of this choice, whether it's harder or not to implement. The idea is to keep easily compatibility with the other games.

divVerent wrote:Again, there is no TIME to change that. Forget it. There isn't even any USE in it. Increasing the name length, however, is easy: MAX_SCOREBOARDNAME can be increased without any large problems (but would annoy people who host mvdsv Quake servers). With some extra work, it could be increased for GAME_NEXUIZ only by doing if checks where it occurs. Anyone volunteer to do such a patch?

If you mean that every time a name is used in any algorithm I have to do a check of GAME_NEXUIZ, I can do it. Otherwise, I haven't enough knowledge to distinguish where I have to do it and where not.
So... If it is simple I guess I have to define a new constant: MAX_SCOREBOARDLONGNAME (>64) and use it only when GAME_NEXUIZ is true; if it's false I use the old MAX_SCOREBOARDNAME.
Div: Am I right? And what do you think about the previous post?

terencehill wrote:Instead of raising up MAX_SCOREBOARDNAME, could be a practicable solution to add another field: longname with a higher char limit, keeping the name?
I don't know the implications of this choice, whether it's harder or not to implement. The idea is to keep easily compatibility with the other games.

More complicated.