I was just musing in Chatters a few minutes ago, and an idea popped into my head.

It would work, roughly, as follows: if the checkbox "Preserve text window history" was enabled, upon a normal shutdown, Dream Seeker would read the current contents of the text window and dump them to an RTF file in the cache directory of BYOND. When Dream Seeker loads, it copies the contents of that RTF file back into the Dream Seeker text window. (A "Preserve pager history" checkbox would be appropriate for the pager, as well.)

This has two advantages: one, it would preserve proc crash messages and BYOND BUG messages. (It would be unable to preserve messages leading up to a full-fledged Dream Seeker crash, however, due to the fact that it only stores the RTF file on a normal shutdown. The only solution to that would be to maintain a constant file stream and send output to that file every time a line appeared in the Window, and that's what the log functionality is for.)

Two, it would allow people who accidentally close Dream Seeker, who have to close Dream Seeker to reboot, etc., to be capable of picking up right from where they left off without losing the former text.


Another thing I was considering was an ability to change the text window history length to a non-hard-coded value; as it stands, the window currently has a hard-coded maximum history of 200 lines or so; it would be nice if people with ultra low-end machines (or who are hosting a memory-intensive game) could drop that down in order to save memory, and people with high-end machines could increase that value at the expense of memory in order to maintain longer text window histories.