There is a very small limit to what you can type in to a line of chat. It's worse than twitter, and what you can type in to the UI is less than what you can send from a plugin or through the IRC relay. I request the following changes:

* Make the UI limit equal to the chat engine limit
* Increase the chat engine limit
* Automatically break up long lines (within reason, to prevent flooding)
* Incorporate Hamming distance in to the rate limiting system so that the above changes don't encourage flooding. I think I have a basic implementation of Hamming distance in Lua lying around somewhere if you want it.

Yeah, the limit should be the same for the regular in-game interface and what can be done through plugins and IRC.

-1, plugin related issues can be solved without specials and current length is more than enough to chat on 100.

+1, although I kind of agree with you pirren, there is no reason I should be able to send more characters via the console than the chatbox, the limit should at least me the same. You don't need a plugin OR third party stuff, just open the console, use /say blah blah, and you can get at least 6-8 more words in.

The limit should be the same though, not increased.

-1 Limit your chat to the UI

Please illustrate how your suggestion will affect longcat. Cannot provide a +/- until you do so. Thx.

HUD.chatframe[1][1][1][2].nc = 255 -- HUD chat
HUD.chatframe[1][1][2][2].nc = 255 -- HUD mission chat?

PDAChatArea[2][2].nc = 255 -- PDA chat
StationChatArea[2][2].nc = 255 -- Station chat
CapShipChatArea[2][2].nc = 255 -- CapShip chat

-- Maximized chats
MaximizedSpaceChat[1][1][1][2][2].nc = 255
MaximizedStationChat[1][1][1][2][2].nc = 255
MaximizedCapShipChat[1][1][1][2][2].nc = 255

-- Put that in a Lua file and make a plugin out of it. Done.

Longcat will get loooonger, of course.

Also note that the chat textbox uses the iup default textbox character limit (which happens to be 160 characters), that is, it doesn't have any chat limit explicitly set. I don't believe there's a good reason that it's limited in the interface to 160 instead of 255 characters besides the fact that the developers simply never bothered to change it from the default.