Match Fading Updates

[Jim McDonald <Jim mcdee net>]

Hi,
   I've just committed a bunch of changes to CVS that provide the infrastructure for match fading.  Due to the renaming of some files and reformatting of a number of others there are a lot of differences, but it's not that much of a change.

   I posted a mail a while back about what is going on behind the scenes, but to recap all matches returned by backends now get thrown together into a pot (currently organised by category for ease of display) and they have a rating attached to them.  The rating changes periodically due to events such as new information being received, the tick of a timer, etc. and when the rating reaches 0 the item disappears.

   There are definitely some areas that need improvement, and some bits that are flakey.  Off the top of my head:

• the ratings next to each item are there for debugging purposes, however I figured for the moment it would be better to leave them in
• at the moment the screen redraws itself every second, which is annoying if you're trying to get to something further down the list
• matches are not being removed internally when they reach 0
• matches are not being sorted by rating (you'd think this would be an easy one, wouldn't you?)
• the simple elevator is hard-coded to load, and there is no attempt to look for or load other elevators
• very few of the backends take advantage of the ability to pass in different ratings for each match.  An obvious example of where this might be of great use would be in bookmarks, where the rating for the match can depend on the correlation between the clue text and the bookmark name

So all in all this isn't a finished work, but it does represent a step in the right direction.  More than anything I think it gives a bunch of hooks that will allow people to start working on their own little bugbears around the current system (match renderers, for instance, Nat :).  Have a play and see what you think, and feel free to ask questions about any of the technicalities or underlying ideas/assumptions.

Cheers,
Jim.

-- 
Jim McDonald - Jim mcdee net