I was reminded a while ago by the problems with the Panel size and position options to have another look at the way the client options are handled. This finally got to the top of the pile.
So client options are currently provided from four sources: 1. data/base/client-options.xml 2. ActionManager 3. client-options.xml in any saved game if present 4. The user <config>/<rules>/options.xml if present FreeColClient uses all of these, and ConnectController.startSavedGame updates with the saved game options. There are a few problems. 1. The saved game and options.xml files can (do in my case!) contain outdated options, options in the wrong group, and possibly even incorrect ones if we change an option type (e.g. there are a few IntegerOptions that might be better as Range or Percentage options). To deal with this I have committed a fix that only merges options from these sources if they match what was already loaded from sources #1 and #2, which are considered to be definitive. This does not help with the case of panel options that contain unfortunate (but not invalid) sizes, but it at least fixes some worse problems. 2. If there is a saved game, its options get merged twice. We need this to happen in ConnectController as that happens every time we start a different game (like from the Open menu entry), whereas the routine in FreeColClient only gets called once. We could just drop the check for saved game there, but this leaves a window where the client options are incomplete. I am not sure if that breaks anything. 3. When we merge a set of options from sources #3 or #4, the last one merged wins. Currently this will be #3 if present (due to the second merge) or #4 for new games (although I think we have a bug if you start a saved game and then use the New menu entry). This is not unreasonable, but perhaps surprising. BTW, no, we do not need a client option to control this! However there might be a case for a command line argument to allow you to play someone else's game but with your preferred client options, which I have wanted for debugging purposes. 4. The commit mentioned above breaks saving of Panel size and position options --- because these options are not mentioned in the base client-options.xml they will be ignored when subsequently merged. They also get added at the top client options level which is a mess, they should have their own subgroup. However, they should continue to work in-game for now, that is, if they were working at all. I do not propose to fix this for 0.11.4, partly as adding a new option group requires touching the messages file, and partly because I am not sure what the Right Thing to do is. 5. When options.xml is written, all the actions get needlessly written too, then subsequently ignored on read (see AbstractOption.readOption). This needs cleaning up. As stated above, I propose to do nothing more on this for 0.11.4, but I would be interested in suggestions on the way forward. Cheers, Mike Pope
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