Open chat access

[Erth Paradine]

Request:
Change chat so that integration with other server instances, and even third-party connectivity, are possible: consider integration with IRC, instead of the current home-grown (and limited) chat function.

Rationale:

• Building in single-player gets lonely, fast. Building on a popular server is fun, until some faction decides to PVP somewhere else across the galaxy, and/or some other (typically) PVP/PVE related lag spoils the fun. Now your server is crashing, of your simply lagging-out, and you've lost valuable unsaved build work.
• Having a dedicated build server, and a dedicated PVP/PVE server would be great, but they're both completely isolated instances, including the social aspect.
• If the existing chat system were revised, to instead utilize a standardized chat engine, such as IRC (for a java implementation, see jIRCd), then communications amongst multiple servers could be linked together. Factions playing across multiple servers could still stay in touch. Designers/builders could entice players onto their server, and PVP/PVE players could entice others to join them. It would effectively enable players to better network and communicate with each-other.
• Having IRC support, would also mean that features such as web-chat would be possible, without requiring a third-party server wrapper, chat logfile monitor, and/or the current awkward and often confusing [SERVER] tag on out-of-game messages from players accessing via a homegrown webchat function.
• The current chat system also lacks support for popular languages, for instance, Russian is currently written as:

2016/05/13 - 10:04:13 [PlayerName]: ??? ???? ????????
2016/05/13 - 10:04:15 [PlayerName]: ????? ?????​

....this is not only frustrating for non-english speakers, it's an exceedingly useless waste of resources and disk space.​

• Shifting to an IRC chat engine would also facilitate easier third-party integration, such as through the use of IRC bots that could be programmed to complete tasks otherwise requiring a server wrapper, or an Admin/mod to manually execute (e.g. help I'm stuck, I need a core, etc).
• Banking/economy plugins could easily be integrated as well - by using an IRC bot to leverage a combination of player and server/admin commands.
• Shifting to an IRC based chat engine could be as straight forward as integrating a localhost based IRC server with vanilla (therefore not adding any complicated third-party requirements). While also allowing for a configuration-based change that could point servers to a different IRC server if the server operator desired.

 

[Bogdan]

Request:
Change chat so that integration with other server instances, and even third-party connectivity, are possible: consider integration with IRC, instead of the current home-grown (and limited) chat function.

Rationale:

• Building in single-player gets lonely, fast. Building on a popular server is fun, until some faction decides to PVP somewhere else across the galaxy, and/or some other (typically) PVP/PVE related lag spoils the fun. Now your server is crashing, of your simply lagging-out, and you've lost valuable unsaved build work.
• Having a dedicated build server, and a dedicated PVP/PVE server would be great, but they're both completely isolated instances, including the social aspect.
• If the existing chat system were revised, to instead utilize a standardized chat engine, such as IRC (for a java implementation, see jIRCd), then communications amongst multiple servers could be linked together. Factions playing across multiple servers could still stay in touch. Designers/builders could entice players onto their server, and PVP/PVE players could entice others to join them. It would effectively enable players to better network and communicate with each-other.
• Having IRC support, would also mean that features such as web-chat would be possible, without requiring a third-party server wrapper, chat logfile monitor, and/or the current awkward and often confusing [SERVER] tag on out-of-game messages from players accessing via a homegrown webchat function.
• The current chat system also lacks support for popular languages, for instance, Russian is currently written as:

2016/05/13 - 10:04:13 [PlayerName]: ??? ???? ????????
2016/05/13 - 10:04:15 [PlayerName]: ????? ?????​

....this is not only frustrating for non-english speakers, it's an exceedingly useless waste of resources and disk space.​

• Shifting to an IRC chat engine would also facilitate easier third-party integration, such as through the use of IRC bots that could be programmed to complete tasks otherwise requiring a server wrapper, or an Admin/mod to manually execute (e.g. help I'm stuck, I need a core, etc).
• Banking/economy plugins could easily be integrated as well - by using an IRC bot to leverage a combination of player and server/admin commands.
• Shifting to an IRC based chat engine could be as straight forward as integrating a localhost based IRC server with vanilla (therefore not adding any complicated third-party requirements). While also allowing for a configuration-based change that could point servers to a different IRC server if the server operator desired.

I like the suggestion, even though it sounds relatively difficult to implement.
One thing I have noticed is that I can type in Russian and it appears in Russian in the chat. Whilst Russian in-game names for example do not work out, Russian words as such do show up in chat. At least that is the impression I was under as for me it didn't work before while now when I type in French, Spanish or Russian with the respective accents and Cyrillic letters, the message does seem to come across.

 

[therimmer96]

Fairly certain the chat is based on a modified IRC server. Shouldn't be too difficult to pull some of this off.