[Freeciv-Dev] (PR#11805) Store chat and notify messages for later retrieval

["Ed Overton" <edoverton@xxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=11805 >

In a long turn game where players are disconnected most of the time,
messages (both chat and notifications) are not seen.  It would be nice
if chat and notifications were stored for each player, and the player
could retrieve those that were missed when the player reconnects.

The chat and notifications should be stored separately since they are
handled differently by the client (and it would be bad to let chat
messages possibly cause game messages to scroll "off" the stack).  The
server would then support:

   /messages new    # shows any chat / notifies since last connect
   /messages all    # shows all stored chat / notifies
   /messages N      # shows the last N chat / notifies

Currently the server does issue some notifies to the player on a
connection - my intent would be to have the server skip that step, but
instead issue a "/messages new" automatically (much like what appears to
be an automatic "/list" at connection time).

The stored messages should have a timestamp attached - not necessarily
for display purposes, but so that the chat and notifies may be
interleaved in their proper order.

I've poked around in the code a little bit, and it appears the current
implementation solely handles messages for connected players.  As a
result, I believe these changes are going to imply a large scope since
some of the originating message calls may need to be changed.

Another piece of this bug will enable the handling of another bug (I
don't have that bug ID right now, but will update this ticket with it in
just a bit).  The other bug requests that messages the saved game files
store messages.

I'm planning to do this code work myself, so somewhere down the road I
intend to provide a patch.