changes:
rscadd: "Ported a new chat system, Goonchat, that allows for cool things like changing font style, size, spacing, highlighting up to 5 strings in the chat, and DARK MODE."
rscadd: "Repeated chat messages can now get compacted. You can disable this in goonchat settings."
rscadd: "You can change icon style to any font on your system."
tweak: "The game window has been altered a bit to adjust for this."
rscdel: "Removed skin style prefs as they are no longer used."
This PR will lead us towards the Promised Day, for in its wake there shall be much celebration and ecstasy as this world becomes a world suitable for developer hegemony. The first strike is thusly;
All << is converted into to_chat().
The system used to be of complexity O(n^2). Essentially two for loops running per every argument. Which ended up being surprisingly slow (there were instances where I saw the argument parser as using quite a lot of CPU time).
This replaces it with a more linear algorithm. It's somewhere near O(n) where n is the length of the unparsed query. Which is more stable and faaaster. This comes with two changes, however:
Parameters inside the query now have to be delimited from both sides with : (colons). The alternative to this would be to use something like $n or just assume that space marks the end of a marker. Only the former is workable, the latter would break a few queries already.
Arguments in the argument array no longer have to be prefixed by : (colons). So, while in the query you would write :thing:, you'd initialize the array of args as: list("thing" = somevar). It could be made to work without it, but eh, I think this is fine.
Argument validation is slightly weaker. What I mean by this is that with the old system, unused keys would result in an error. This is no longer a thing. Missing keys will still result in an error, however.
One more improvement: double delimiting removes an edge case where if key A partially covers key B, depending on the order, key A would mangle key B.
Updated and tested all queries that I could find. So this should be good.
The idea is to consolidate all of the spam that you see on the lower right panel into one concrete, semi-persistent pop-up window. Utilizing bootstrap, it'll show you a neat welcome screen, the message of the day, staff memos (if accessible), and a personalized set of notifications. The system is set up for easy future expansion, as well.
Both procs are now generalized, and accept a DBConnection object as an argument. Due to this generalization, all instances of `establish_db_connection()` must be renamed to `establish_db_connection(dbcon)`.
Also added variable `failed_connections` to the definition of DBConnection.
