I dislike the /msg system since it's a bit cumbersome, so I used that impetus as an exercise to write a small plugin that lets you chat with other players in a separate window, called BuddyChat.

http://b3ta.pantsu.org/VO/buddychat.tgz

Comments are very welcome. There's a serious bug: clicking outside of a chat window when in outer space breaks things. Typing "/close" in the chat "fixes" it. Within a station it's fine.

2 things I see,

1) use the :hide and :show instead of the elaborate kills. that will fix your station issue.

2) budcha.commands() use if args then budcha.new_chat_window(args[1]) else print("usage....") end. this will fix the error when you type just /budcha

Ed

> 1) use the :hide and :show instead of the elaborate kills. that will fix your station issue.

Not quite sure what you mean. I use hide and show to, well, hide and show the window. The issue is that the window keeps keyboard focus when you click outside the window, but you can't then use the mouse on the window again (to move or close it). I first thought it might lose focus completely (hence the killfocus_cb thing), but obviously that's not what's going on.

> 2) budcha.commands() use if args then budcha.new_chat_window(args[1]) else print("usage....") end. this will fix the error when you type just /budcha

Heh, that problem happened because I sloppily missed a return on the first nil test :).

\o/ The problem is generic. It even works with the console... bring it up in outer space, click elsewhere, and the mouse becomes useless.

Before everything was moved into the pda the game got around that by putting the dialog into transparent fullscreen windows. The options window and messages still work like that.

It's not practical in all situations though, cause you can't interact with anything behind the top window.