FGU Chat Scrollback Buffer Setting/Lost Text...

[HoloGnome]

Is there a setting to tell FGU not to limit the scrollback buffer size for the chat within the context of the same gaming session?

FGU seems to be reaching a limit and cutting off text from within the same session. I would like to tell it not do that because I need to be able to see all of the events from the start of the current session no matter how far back they go. Is there a fix for this issue? (FGC does not have this issue...or not that I have ever noticed.)

Thanks.

ps. Also, I think I noticed that FGU does not correctly calculate the scrolling percentage for the chat window scrollbar thumb based on the number of lines of text currently in the scrollback buffer. When you scroll back, the thumb reaches the top before all the text is done and then just bounces around at the top of the scrollbar. Seems like a math error somewhere.

[Moon Wizard]

There is no mechanism to adjust the chat buffer limit; and is clipped on purpose for performance reasons. The full chatlog is always available at chatlog.html in the campaign folder. This was implemented almost identically in FGC.

Regards,
JPG

[anstett]

This extension might help.

https://forge.fantasygrounds.com/shop/items/1050/view

It only works on the GM side but it does gather things very nicely.

Description This extension adds a Chatlog Viewer so you can easily review chat logs from previous sessions.
CoreRPG Compatible
Usage:Open: The chatlog viewer can be opened using the tool button near the options button.
Parse the Log: To parse the log, click on the refresh button in the top left of the window. If you have a large chat log from many sessions, this could take some time.
Select Session: After parsing the log, the dropdown will be updated with an entry with the date each session was started in the format YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM. Select the session and review the log below.

[HoloGnome]

Honestly, I have never experienced any chat text clipping in FGC, including across very long sessions, but I did just see it in FGU.

What is the performance hit or issue? Text records seem like fairly minimal overhead.

Modern machines have high amounts of RAM, fast CPUs and text is very small. DBs should be able to handle it. Also, RAM<->Disk i/o buffering (or even partitioning solely in RAM or via segmented DB records of some fixed size -- it's DB-based now, right?) shouldn't be too demanding. When you reach the thumb margin, you load the previous segment(s), but only for the user who is requesting it in their client, whether it is the GM or a player. Or cache it locally on the client side so that scrollback doesn't require any network transfers. It seems like there might be multiple possible solutions.

Extended chat benefits both GMs and players who need it for different reaasons. GMs may need to see previous combats, etc. and players may want to review older items, descriptions and other text that might be in the chat.

Thanks for mentioning the extended chatlog plugin - looks very cool! However, it would also be great if FGU would just be able to view all the text within the same session without any clipping.

I hope that this is an architectural area where FGU can expand chat functionality to address this issue.

Thanks for the replies. I will remain optimistic for a future release! :)

[HoloGnome]

@anstett Thanks - Chatlog Explorer seems to work. The only thing it is missing is the ability to add tags to a session so that you can quickly find when specific events happened. Would be nice...but...

[anstett]

I do fully agree that in my preferred set up when a Player logs in they could scroll back up to see what they missed before they log in. We are a fully text/chat based game so I tend to focus on that more than others. 20+ years of chat logs does build up :)

With the way FG uses full html coding in the chat logs I have created macros in Word to handle reformatting into our wiki format, font/color code languages, environmental things like saves, hits, spells, etc. It does need to be done at the end of the session but only takes a few minutes to format and update our site. Not ideal but getting closer.

[HoloGnome]

@anstett I agree. Optimistically speaking, there should be no performance issues with managing any size text buffer (html or not). In addition, there are Open Source html parsers that could even significantly extend the chatbox paradigm (and/or help optimize parsing, if that is an issue).

And honestly, I wasn't even asking for linking back to previous sessions, even though that would be amazingly useful. It's a problem that has come up in multiple (extended campaign) sessions (which is why that plugin is very useful). However, for the majority case, I just don't want to lose what's in the current/active session because of a truncated chat buffer.

Your macros sound cool. Also, your site looks very nice - good job! I wish I had more time to deal with these gotchas in trying to cut over to FGU from FGC. FGU obviously has a lot of new benefits/features.