RFC: Dom-Assistant

[alexti]

I was thinking about the program that would provide consolidated access to the various info related to MP game.

Usually, I receive/send message from/to other players using in-game Messages, email or web Boards. I also typically put some notes related to the game progress (who used what in the battles I happened to observe, for example). As the game progresses all these become hard to find and manage.

So the idea is to make a program to assist in this. Before I started to program anything I'd like to get an idea if anybody also feel a need for such program. Also, I'd like to get comments on my ideas about functionality and collect suggestions.

I was considering the following functionality:
- support for several games, data stored separately, user can select which one to use (one at a time).
- support of conversation trees: user can select the nation and view the diplomatic conversation he has conducted with that nation (shown in some convenient form, probably one color for the user and the second color for another nation.
- addition of Messages: add Messages sent/received to the nation (cut-and-paste style and probably allow to compose the Messages)
- note support, the user can add notes to save certain information, notes can be either general or associated with specific nation. They can be viewed later either all together or by selected nation. Also, the notes can be classified (for example research notes, battle tactics notes, commander notes etc). Then they can also be filtered by a note class

And some more functionality that I'd like to have, but I don't consider it a first priority:
- time line (kind of time filter, where the user can select the time, let's say turn 25 and see what notes he has made at that period of time and what Messages he has sent/received). It could work as sort of scrollbar, which would keep all others views (conversation with various nations and notes) in sync
- image attachments to the notes (mainly screenshots of the map)
- integration: sort of being able to send the message to the selected nation and at least keep track of his/her email address/web forum nick.

Potentially, such an application could be used for other MP games as well, because the link with Dom will be about limited to the list of nations.

I'm uncertain about how to make it run on many platforms. Console/command line style probably won't appeal to hardcode Windows user, so I'd probably settle for a simple WinAPI applications, so that it can be compiled with winelib (or maybe just run under Wine) on Linux and Solaris. I know very little about Mac, does anybody know if Win32 programs can be run there somehow (does Wine work on MacOS X)?

Alternative solution is just to make it the back end and use web browser for UI. Then the back end can just be compiled and run on any platform.