Please make tab completion in chat show you a list of possible completions. More new names in chat with similar beginnings is sometimes irritating. If it would either show you a list or go to the next possible completion when you push tab again or something, that would be nice.

+1

I find that if I have keys with various names of the same person sometimes it's hard to know which is the right person.

There's actually a plugin that does this... somewhere. I'll link it if I find it. Dunno how it works or anything, though.

Edit: And found it!

Thats not the same thing luxen, the OP is for showing possible completions, not people who have PMed you in the past.

+1 I mean, I don't know how feasible this is, but it does seem my client would already have this information. When you first log in, tab completion doesn't work until you have seen a few people talking, or in sector, so it should be limited like this too, you should NOT be able to use this feature to find out if someone is online (that information was taken away from us for a reason).

How would it work? IUP used by VO doesn't currently allow for dropdowns from the chat box, but I guess a pop up dialogue would do. Type a few characters, if there is only 1 possible match, use it, if there is more than one, offer a choice in a pop up?

Might not be as intuitive as some think though.

in standard IRC the tab completion has the added functionality that if you press tab multiple times it will show the next possible match based on the list of names in the channel. I know that this may be more than Incarnate wants for the full general 100 chat channel. However, even just having this available for anyone in the same sector would be nice.

so, right now, tab will fill in the chat; how about pressing tab will create the tooltip window with the game's first choice for autofill, and only when the player presses enter will it get set to chat? They can press tab again for the game to try the next option; backspace or escape cancels the autofill.

I think I could even make it a plugin, except I dunno how the name matching system works.

Most of the pieces you'd need to do this as a plugin can be found in TabReply++ for the name completion and MDI HUD or some other approach for the visual indicators.

The function tabcomplete(<string>, <number>) takes the string you want to analyze and the point in the string where you want to perform string completion from. It returns the given string with the name completed, and adds quotation marks if necessary. However, it doesn't work on multiple attempts. Someone would need to write a new function to iterate over the word that you start the tab completion from.

Names would need to be populated in a table as encountered through chat or travel.

But this is getting outside the scope of suggestions, since I'm sure ray knows how to implement it. Discussion about a plugin implementation should probably be moved to a community projects thread.