Friends

[.die]

I think there really should be a friends list, that lets you see what server people you enjoy playing with are in, I'd say it would make the game much better.

[DDMJ]

How about just looking at a Server Browser for your friends.

EDIT: /me has 0x200 posts!

[.die]

Well that makes sense, but a friends list would be much faster. You wouldn't have to go looking through all the servers.

[XzL.Smart]

theres not really that many servers on this game to look thorugh

[K-Yo]

i agree with .die
i'm not lazy at all, but and having my friend list who shows who's online and who's not would be nice.

[Lucifer]

i agree with .die
i'm lazy and want you to do all this extra work so that I can continue being lazy.

Just FYI, that's how I read your post. When you're asking for something, or trying to support someone asking for something, never say that you're lazy.

[Z-Man]

Yeah, and they draw ridicule like, for example

You want a firends list? Here it is:

Code: Select all

Your Mom
Your Teddy Bear

Ha Ha Ha! Fun-ny!

Seriously, an in-game friends list would be of limited use. It would be limited to people wo are actually just playing. Out-of-game friends lists spanning multiple games provided by external programs that show you who would be ready to play when you are ready have a much higher chance of actually arranging a game between friends. Unfortunately, all those management programs I know about either are proprietary and tied to Windows (Steam, GameSpy) or are not really that useful yet (GGZ, haven't checked on that in a while).

[Lucifer]

Now that he's edited his post....

I've often thought a friends list would be handy, where you can spam your friends and say "Anybody up for freeciv/arma/scorched3d?"

Then I realized that all the people I ask that question to hang out in #armagetron. What you really want is your IM/IRC program to integrate with online gaming services.

[kyle]

EDIT: /me has 0x200 posts!

so 512 posts

[epsy]

such a feature is unsuitable to arma

i mean, you would have like 100 buddies in it ? with the clients looking for them every 2 minutes laggying you to death?

you want an external app ? then help projects like XQF etc

so what ?

you want it simple ?

most of the arma players do use IM (msn, skype(ftl) etc)....
why not telling the server you're in in a status message ?

you might even want a little script to do it automatically
fine, write a simple logparser to set your status message

[.die]

i mean, you would have like 100 buddies in it ? with the clients looking for them every 2 minutes laggying you to death?

It wouldn't have to be searching every 2 minutes, why not just have the list and a refresh button, coming up with the servers these friends are on? Just open armagetron, go to friends and just hit refresh to see where your friends are, if they're online or not, all that good stuff.

[Tank Program]

I wrote a patch that sort of works. There's a slight issue with string initialization that I can't work out, so if someone could look it over and figure out what I'm doing wrong that'd be cool. It's been written against the latest SVN, 7518.

[Z-Man]

Don't encourage them, Tank

The problem you are having probably comes from the intricate relation between gServerInfo objects and their menu items. I'll have a look at it. Your patch also applies pretty cleanly to 0.2.8, only the trivial makefile hunk fails.

[Tank Program]

It wasn't so much a matter of encouragement as that I happened to have a good, minimum effort idea for implementation that would do it. The exact problem seems to be that if you have the friends filter on and then go to internet game it segfaults in tString::Len(). If you go in to the disable/enable screen first, or browse before enabling and come back it doesn't segfault and works correctly. I assume it's something with string initialization but I wasn't able to figure it out before.

[Z-Man]

That patch is good, it found two fatal flaws in other bits of arma A fix for one made it into 0.2.8 already, the other is still pending; I've got a 0.2.8 checkout here with the patch applied and it works like a charm. I'd vote to include it into 0.2.8.3. Lucifer?

We've just got a small interface problem. We need a key to toggle the friends filter in the server browser. "f" would be obvious, but that's already the default key for fullscreen toggle and would not be optimal. "b" like "buddies" is taken by the bookmark function. "p" like "pals" is taken by the ping function. Two possibilities would be "m" for mates or "h" for homies At that point, me and tank ran out of synonyms. Of course, the ingame texts should then be made to match the key.