IRC client in the game (working prototype)

I've been playing warsow recently and accidentally found out about it's neat feature: an IRC client integrated into the game. I've tried it out with my bouncer and thought I should get this feature into my favorite game by all means. A day of dirty engine hacking resulted into this:

Nexuiz screenshots: 1, 2, 3
Xonotic screenshots: 1

I made it mostly for my own needs, but thought someone might like it too. It's used with my ZNC on those screenshots, you can see my regular client (irssi) at the background (but of course it works with normal IRC servers). The client supports a single server at a time, and lacks many of advanced features (but hell, you're not going to IRC from the game at all, right?). Basic IRC features are supported, including hilights (with user-defined words). Most of it is controled with the console, all IRC commands and cvars have irc_ prefix and are documented. There's also a quick way to input messages by pressing a key (much like T for normal game chat or Y for teamchat), to use this you'll need to bind irc_messagemode to a key. IRC messages can be printed in 3 ways: in the console, in the game chat, or (default) hilights and privmsgs go to the chat area and the rest goes to console. Currently planned features are mIRC color support, channel watching and more irc-related commands (such as more and topic).

You can get the source at Xonotic GIT, akari/irc branch of darkplaces repository. You need this library in order to compile and run it. I haven't had a chance to test this on anything but x86 Linux. If you're building on another platform, please report your success or failure. And of course, any kind of feedback, suggestions or criticism is welcome and appreciated.

O_O

^Initial reaction


O____________O

^Reaction 5 minutes later



NO MORE RCON2IRC YAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

It probably needs work though, so we'll see what divVerent says -- But, with GENUINE IRC support for DP we could do a lot of fun things. For one: It would be MUCH easier to do notifications such as flag caps and such in the game code -- Hell, tons of things could be done with it. As said on #xonotic, i'll maybe add some "ircprint" function and implement the same functionality of rcon2irc if this is accepted ^_^

Cool work

Wow, that looks really awesome

I love the IRC from Warsow, and if Xonotic had that it would be great.

Just a note: probably overkill, but perhaps libpurple might be handy to anyone who wants to write a full featured chat plugin? I'd probably only use xmpp+irc, but for the sake of completeness it might be worth it if it plays nice with DP.

Wow, that looks really awesome

I love the IRC from Warsow, and if Xonotic had that it would be great.

Then I suggest to start using it and tell me how well it works I am in need of testing, especially for Windows and OSX (which I have never even used)

Just a note: probably overkill, but perhaps libpurple might be handy to anyone who wants to write a full featured chat plugin? I'd probably only use xmpp+irc, but for the sake of completeness it might be worth it if it plays nice with DP.

And add a web browser, an IDE and a terminal emulator as well, so I would never want to leave the game

Seriously though, if we supported full featured multiprotocol chat (or even just multiserver IRC), it would be a pain to use with such a user interface. And also I never intended to write a chat monster, I just needed a way to instantly see my hilights in the chat area, watch some channels like #minsta.pickup and the #thebadasschoobs (our clan channel), drop quick responses to privmsgs, etc. But if you really need IM support in DP, you could use something like bitlbee with this client. I'm actually curious to see how well would it work.

Here is an even crazier idea, an achievements and notifications system using xmpp.