IDEAS FOR RYZOM

The "Customer Service" department has informed me that this is the only forum where they will accept this submission, inappropriate as it is.

When a scrollable text window is scrolled back (up) so that the last line is not visible, it constantly scrolls down as new text is appended by other processes (ie: a scrolled back chat window will keep scrolling as others add chats). This makes it very difficult to read past text when new text is actively being appended since the viewport keeps scrolling down.

This is known as a transiently updated scrollable text window. The specified behavior should be:
* When scrolled to the end, the viewport should scroll down as new text is appended.
* When scrolled to the start, the viewport should scroll down as starting lines are deleted (if they are).
* When scrolled to anywhere else, the viewport should maintain position when text is transiently appended by other processes.
* If the user manually enter some text, the viewport should automatically scroll to the end to show that newly appended text.

The fact that the Ryzom scrollable text windows do not follow the specified behavior is a BUG, not an idea or a request for function, and it is such an easy fix to implement. The response from Support that "it is not at this point seen as a bug", simply demonstrates the incompetence and intransigence of that department.

It does no good to request the cooperation of the user community in reporting bugs and issues, and even providing an easy in-game method to submit them, if Support spends most of their time inventing excuses to not deal with them or even deny they exist. This is the second time I've received a blatantly ridiculous response like this from Support.

That's all I have to say about the issue. I've done my due diligence as an active client of this user community. I now understand why I was warned by so many people that most of what you get from support is abuse, but I'll continue to report what I find anyway.

Biroeq --

I'm sorry that you see the response as demonstrating bad interaction on the part of the support staff.

While you may be correct that the behavior that you describe is desirable, it is not inherently a BUG, if the devs (now long gone) did it that way on purpose.  It does not matter whether or not it is industry standard (and in my experience what you describe is NOT industry standard; I far more often encounter the Ryzom behavior), if it is intended, it is not a bug.

This part of the forums *is* the correct venue for proposing a change to current behavior.

For my part I would definitely support your call for a change of behavior of the chat boxes.

+1

Bittty

There is no reasonable functionality that is provided by the behavior of this bug. A behavior that deviates from any reasonable use case is a bug.
I never said the specification I quoted was "industry standard". I said it was a formalized coding pattern known as "transiently updated scrollable text window". I'm not surprised that you have encountered this bug elsewhere since boilerplate patching is now rampantly commonplace in current MMO code. The same bugs are replicated everywhere.
The in-game support function provides a number of categories for submitted issues. One of them is "Bugs". That's where I submitted this bug.
My main point was that, no matter the opinion of category, formalized use case, or encountered examples: The proper response would have been to acknowledge the issue and, since it is such a simple fix, address it as soon as possible. I'm gratified to see that, on that, we agree.

Umm.... I didn't mention in my response the fact that the CSR staff consists of about four people  (that I know of) and that the number of coders (as far as I can tell) is about three.  They seem to be able to do php and python, hence the fact that almost all new stuff is in the WebIG. Therefore the fix is not "simple", unless you go to the Ryzom Core group, find the code and suggest the fix yourself.

This is not a game with a lot of backup staff.  They do their best, and they do listen to us, but it takes a lot longer to fix things than you might expect.

  Bittty -- (not a CSR and really really really not a coder)

<grin> I'm already there and deep in NeL. It'll be awhile before I grok enough of the GUI code and scripting to find this bug.

A 37 year coding veteran. I started to play to better understand the core code.

Biroeg,

Please join the Ryzom Core community on irc.freenode.net in #ryzom. I can try and give you some tips on where to start (sfb) and another member, dfighter, recently wrote a GUI Editor and refactored the GUI code. So between the two of us we should be able to get you in the right place.

Also  our issue tracker isn't necessarily used by Winch Gate but if things are there they are things we'll try and work on:

https://bitbucket.org/ryzom/ryzomcore/issues?status=new&statu s=open

Thanks!

thanks for trying, keep up the effort.