SRCDS: Console Filtering

[quasi stirrup]

I know that Cleaner (https://github.com/accelerator74/Cleaner) is a thing, but it's very hit-or-miss as it isn't guaranteed to work on all panels (looking at you, Pterodactyl).

We need a built-in way to filter console messages for the sake of troubleshooting, development, and most importantly: moderation. Having a bunch of VScript errors or misc. warnings spamming on my console that are otherwise safe to ignore do not serve me at all.

@wind plume why against it? Just curious

[wind plume]

https://tenor.com/view/chad-pyro-dance-gif-7097457066479144515

[quasi stirrup]

I love constructive criticism

[wind plume]

arson

[glad cipher]

Does con_filter_text_out with con_filter_enable 1 not help?

[quasi stirrup]

Uhh...

con_filter_text_out
Unknown command "con_filter_text_out"
con_filter_enable 
Unknown command "con_filter_enable"
sm_cvar con_filter_enable 
[SM] Unable to find cvar: con_filter_enable
sm_cvar con_filter_text_out
[SM] Unable to find cvar: con_filter_text_out

[quasi stirrup]

Is that clientside?

Because this is what I got on my Linux dedicated server after having done a find:

"con_group_include_name" = "0"
 game
 - Includes groups when printing.
"con_group_reload"
 game
 - Reloads all console groups.
"con_group_list"
 game
 - Prints a list of all console groups.
"con_group_toggle"
 game
 - Toggles a console group.
"con_timestamp" = "0"
 - Prefix console.log entries with timestamps
"con_logfile" = ""
 - Console output gets written to this file

[glad cipher]

Oh that might be the case then yeah
Then it won't help, sorry

[quasi stirrup]

Yeah, my suggestion was for dedi servers, my bad

SRCDS: Console Filtering

[plain ibex]

I’d honestly prefer structured logging for this.

[quasi stirrup]

Logging is good, but should be treated separately. I don't want to dig through logs when I need to monitor what's going on in real time.

[plain ibex]

Structured logging can be used in real-time.

[quasi stirrup]

Am I misunderstanding this? What does that mean?

[plain ibex]

Instead of logging text, you log data structures with types and other metadata. So you could for example filter by a “chat” type and just see chat messages or an “error” type to just see errors.

[quasi stirrup]

Not sure how that should be implemented, though. Filtering console output is fairly easy enough and is guaranteed to work across every panel, but how would you safely approach that? Type prefixes (ERROR: (...), CHAT: (...), etc)?
-# I like the idea btw

[plain ibex]

One of the more common ways to do it is to have a stream of JSON objects. But it can be as simple as prepending a type to the beginning of a log.

[quasi stirrup]

Semi-offtopic, but having JSON in Source would be dope ngl

[plain ibex]

That’s kinda VDF. Vscript supports manipulating VDF files.

[quasi stirrup]

VDF are keyvalues but they're not quite like JSON I think

Like, what about arrays for example?

Wait am I confusing with another format

Nvm I wasn't

"Header"
{
  "0"
  {
    (...)
  }
  "1"
  {
    (...)
  }
  (...)
}

^This is ugly.

{
  "key": [0, 1, (...)]
}

^This is much nicer and readable

You can also insert integers, floats, and booleans without "'s

No need to convert from/to string back and forth

[plain ibex]

Fair enough.