Write BetaComments to separate file, not (only) the log and runtime console
This is a request for feature parity with Morrowind's bc
/betacomment
behavior. OpenMW currently implements bc
and betacomment
in essentially the same way as ori
, i.e., the report and comment are written to openmw.log and the runtime console, which is much less useful for modmakers and playtesters. Morrowind's behavior is as follows.
- Morrowind.ini has the line
Beta Comment File=
by default. - If the line is left blank, the in-game console commands
bc "some text"
andbetacomment "some text"
do nothing. - If a filename is added to it, e.g.
Beta Comment File=mycomments.txt
, then whenbc
is run, the game will attempt to load that file from the same directory where Morrowind.exe is located (or create the file if it does not exist), add a new line of text to the end of the file, save it, and then print the text "Beta Comment added." to the in-game console. See screenshots. - Morrowind's
bc
reports are written one per line, in tab-separated format, with columns as follows. (I don't care about preserving this particular arrangement of columns, but it's tremendously helpful to have reports pre-formatted in a way that's easy to import into a spreadsheet tool.)Report/Date (time) PluginWhichCreatedTheReference Plugin/Revision/Date (Time) UserName ReferenceID CellName Xpos Ypos Zpos "user's comment"
Morrowind's beta comment file is never deleted and its contents are never reset, unlike OpenMW's openmw.log. This makes it very useful for playtesting across multiple game sessions, since the user does not have to remember to open openmw.log after every session and copy their bc
reports out of it before launching the game again. I have lost my bc
reports on multiple occasions by forgetting to extract them before relaunching the game, which is very frustrating for someone trying to use OpenMW for mod/game development.
Additionally, there are a couple of enhancements over Morrowind's behavior that would be very useful. I'm not sure if these should be placed in a separate issue.
- Assign a default filename for beta comment outputs ("betacomments.txt"?), rather than allowing
bc
to fail silently by default like Morrowind does. - Morrowind requires multi-word comments to be enclosed in quotes, as in
bc "example comment"
, even thoughbc
only takes one argument. It treats the inputbc example comment
as the commandbc "example"
and discards everything after the second space. That's super dumb and annoying for the playtester.