Hey all,

Most of you know now that I joined the dev team on a volunteer basis about a month ago or so.

I've been working on an external chat client that connects to the SS game chat. Here's a list of the features we're planning on having:

- Allow the monitoring of any number of channels on one screen
- Allow multiple tabs with different channels selected for viewing
- Allow for color-coding the channels as you see fit, with defaults being in-game chat colors
- Allow for setting up flags to notify you when something is said in chat
- Can be when recieving a pm/whisper
- Can be when recieving a message with a word/phrase that you picked in it
- Allow for a list of players that are online, probably just teammates at first, and more later
- Will prepend your message with something to let players know you're using the external client
- Admin will be able to use some of their commands like mute (this still needs to be ironed out)
- You can minimize it to the tray icon and just have it monitor chat for you
- Allow for copy/pasting to make it easier to use then SS chat
- You will use same login/character selection as the game, and rules will still apply (you will still be mutable, etc)

I can't think of anything else right now. Here's a screenshot of an early version, i know its not pretty but we're going for functionality first, then ill spend time making it pretty



Once i finish the main development of this, there is a few things I might work on:
- Updating network code so that some messages are sent more efficiently (UDP vs TCP)
- Writing a separate chat server so that chat messages wont use server time/bandwidth anymore
- Very long run: making it so the Universe can run across multiple servers and therefore be much quicker.

Suggestions for the client will probably not make it into the first iteration, but once its out i'll weigh the feedback by number of people demanding things and improve it based on that. It will probably have some bugs in it too that will need fixing.

Hope to have it out for you guys soon, the server we're going to make live for next uni already has the code to allow it to run, so it should be some time after new uni starts.

pip

As far as long range projects of making networking more efficient I would hope that either it will all be TCP or all be UDP. At times I have needed to use a proxy server to allow SS to work with my internet connection and trying to set up everything to forward TCP and UDP on various ports would be much more difficult. Also with the increasing of issues of bandwidth shaping by ISPs and what not I hope that SS continues to use a single server connection port or at least a well-documented set of ports that it will use so that we don't have to wade through wireshark captures to identify what packets need to get through that might not.

would it be possible to make this chat client available for macs?

Its written in java, so it should work on any platform without too many issues

this is god

Wow, its been some time since I've seen a screeny in dev notes

Sounds great, looking forward to it.

Sweet

looks brilliant, switching things to UDP would be awesome also, because some people cant play at all because their internet providers block TCP/IP because of BitTorrent. Definetly a great addition and looks beautiful =)

If they blocked all of TCP/IP you wouldn't be able to use the Internet.

eeeh, you're such a smartass nuro =P, it blocked the TCP/IP packets that bittorrent used, which is the same type as many games including SS.

Then thank {insert your gods name here} that my ISP doesn't seem to block ANYTHING.

sounds about right...fucking bastards...

mmmmmmmmmmmmm.... chat client. mmmmmmmm...

gotta give you props man, great idea

Um... if the game server crashes, will this new chat client thingy also not work? What i mean is, currently when the server goes down we all run to the forums to talk to each other. With this client can we all run to the chat thingy instead?