When Timing Is Everything

Enhancing Your Session Log

Now with BotBot Support!

Log files are great but they leave a lot out. Getting the visual part of the Palace into your log is probably beyond our scripting powers (a video deck might be handy there!), but there are script helpers we can add to enhance and expand the log.
Here's the first helper. It marks your log whenever you change rooms... it goes into the rarely-used ON ENTER trap. (These scripts are also featured in BotBot) 

ON ENTER {
    "(You have entered " ROOMNAME & ")" & LOGMSG
    {
	{
	    "`list -k" SAY
	} {
	    NBRROOMUSERS	r =
	    0			i =
	    {
		"    " i ROOMUSER WHONAME & LOGMSG
		i ++
	    } { i r < } WHILE
	} ISWIZARD IFELSE
    } NBRROOMUSERS 1 > IF
}

Which helps you in two ways no fiddling with the option or Alt keys trying to figure out who's present when you first enter, and making a tidy note in your log file.
Keeping personal notes in your log file is easy and also handy. Here are two useful OUTCHAT traps to help add annotations to the log.

; log notes
    {
	";;;; " "$1" GREPSUB & LOGMSG
	"" CHATSTR =
    } CHATSTR ";lm (.*)" GREPSTR IF

; BRB marker
    {
	"**** BRB MARKER ****" STATUSMSG
	"^BRB" SAY
	"" CHATSTR =
    } CHATSTR ";bb" == IF

The first ";lm" script lets you add log messages to your log only. Consider it "thinking to yourself" I sometimes use it to make notes about people changing props or exiting or generally being grotesque or wonderful.
The second ";bb" script is really just a "^BRB" the addition of the STATUSMSG marker means that (at least on the mac) a bright red bar

**** BRB MARKER ****
will be written as part of the log window. When I come back from that BRB break, it'l be easy to quickly scroll back through the window and find the point where I left.

Been a Long Time

Realtime chatting can sometimes mean a lot of realtime silence. Sometimes you have nothing to say other times the silence itself is more eloquent than words. This is an important distinction between chatting and reading, and one that's normally eliminated in reading-back a log file. 
    Akbar:	You know what I mean.
    Jeff:	Yeah.
Imagine the change in meaning and context implied as the time between those lines stretches from 1 to 90 seconds.
It's possible to make logfile-minder scripts that can accomodate such timings. It takes a bit of tuning to taste, to do it in the least-obtrusive way possible. Logs with such notations can begin to read more like stage directions, bringing back to mind more of the emotive qualities of the original events.

More To Come