Chat client (PC) - organize PMs/chats by tab

[qan]

Erias recently created a small program to read from his session.log live, and then perform an action based on what is added to the file. This gave me the ability to make something I've wanted to create for a long time: a secondary chat program that hooks into SS with some useful addon features. (I've previously tried to read from the chat window using the Windows API unsuccessfully, as it's a custom control. But just reading from the log should work fine. The only downside is that it will require users to put ?log in their auto-commands list, but that's nice to have anyhow. Also, some users might have problems with granting write access to the log folder.)

Proposed features:

• Keep a backlog of all your PMs between specific people, with tabs for each
• Keep a record of chats, and separate them out into their own tabs
• Custom main chat window that allows you to filter out various types of chat
• Reply to chats and PMs in their own tabs
• Show number of unread messages in various channels

Before diving into it, though, I wanted to get some feedback about how to arrange it. Would you use this program? If so, how would you want it to look? Are there features not listed here that you'd like to see?

Note that at present I'm planning this for Windows-only. Though in all likelihood you could run it in wine for Mac/Linux if desired. Or someone could write a platform-independent implementation.

[BIET]

This would be pretty cool to organize PMs and chats. They certainly become pretty much unreadable if you leave the game environment. How cool would it be though to gather all the public chat and share that with all the users without having to be logged in. Might even have it send through private messages (and chat messages) to the player it is aimed towards (can't tell if that is decipherable in the ?log). This might require a bit more computing than the original idea, but I thought I'd share it anyway. A start could be to display a live public chat feed on the main website. Maybe even a live chat feed from ?go base on the base statistics page, or at least something to show a game is (almost) happening. An activity bar somewhere on the main page perhaps?! Seems like I get more and more crazy ideas whenever I have less and less time to actually contribute to them personally.. heh d:

Oh. and also if it is at all possible to reply in the chat app and have it be an actual reply in-game... I feel more ideas incoming...

[qan]

I'm a little unclear on what you mean about sharing public chat that's aimed toward a particular player, though it sounds interesting. Can you elaborate?

At one point we did have a live public chat feed, I think. Might just be an unpublished link. In any case it's not terribly difficult to do if there's interest. Though, the chat also tends to run a bit rough around the edges...

Yes, you'd be able to reply in the chat app and have it show in-game. The idea would be to essentially make a semi-replacement for the current chat window (though it wouldn't be able to show player lists). That way if you want to just pay attention to PMs from one player, you can keep that tab open and ignore the rest, replying in a chat box like one of the oldschool messenger programs.

One thing that would be nice to be able to do is have many tabs open at once. So maybe you're having two PM conversations, and also want to follow a chat. You'd be able to see them all at once without tab-flipping. Would probably need to still support all the normal chat outputs, including :: replying, as it would get annoying having to switch tabs/chat boxes. So if you type in a PM chat box and don't append anything, it sends as a PM, but if you don't want to switch tabs/boxes and want to send a chat message, you can still do ;6;msg and have it send to chat 6. All replying options would probably come later on, though.

POiD says he's got most of these features up in QuantumSpace already, though plans to add the notification idea. But, this would still be useful before that release.

[BIET]

I meant that whenever you open the app it contains an uptodate version of pub chat, maybe logged by one of the bots or shared across all apps. Normally you start with the blank screen after you log in.

[qan]

Hmm, would be interesting! In that case it'd need to download it from some location ... definitely more of a stretch goal. Would be cool, though. And yeah, could have something that lets you see where you're mentioned, something along those lines.

[Lupin]

I assume you need to have SS running the whole time this app is open right? In that case I see this nifty for those of us with dual monitors - game on one screen, chat on the other. A live chat feed on the web page would be cool btw. When I'm bored at work I would browse it.