[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 >

Sorry for the delay on this ticket.  I did get a chance to look at this
ticket with new eyes, and the more I think about it, the more I want to
be sure I'm heading in the right direction before I start coding.

In short:  Instead of tagging a detailed message with an event code, my
thinking is to use detailed events to trigger a message.  That ties
messaging to events (instead of tying events to messages), which might
be a more natural way to see things.

As I read it, the way things are in the code now, a notification comes
across as a packet_chat_msg, which contains an event type.  In some
sense, the event is part of the message.  I've been thinking about this
in the reverse direction, wherein an event would contain the necessary
information and the message could be triggered out of the event itself.

For the event management described in the events page (
http://www.freeciv.org/index.php/Events ), more detailed events are
going to be necessary.  The event itself will need to know what players
were involved, what tiles were involved, where the activity took place,
etc.  In effect, the event is going to have to know all the messaging
details, with the exception of the actual message text - but that text
can be derived from the event type itself anyway.

Where that leads me is to thinking of messages as nothing more than a
triggered action associated with an event.  Namely, the client would
receive the event, and if the user wants to see notifications for that
event, then the client would render the message text into the
appropriate location.  A possible side benefit would be that the client
might even be able to generate the message text for itself, and fall
back to the server's text when the event is undefined for the client -
users could create their own message skeletons ("Good sir!  We lost a
ME_UNIT to OTHER's YOU_UNIT near LOCATION.").

A chat message would just fall under a specific event subclass for chat
messages, and it could be managed in a similar way.  Obviously, here the
client would not generate the message text.

Has this been discussed in full before somewhere?  If so, sorry for
rehashing it - it's new to me.

Thanks,
Ed