1.) not have the ship flash red if you bump a wall as you enter the station on your way out.

2.) add an idiot light or timer or something for people like me who either come in after the 5 min warning is given, or have too much chatter going to notice the dark blue 5 min warning.

objections? support? indifference?

1.) I'll support this, although I don't think it's particularly important.

2.) For logging in after the 5 min. warning, I can't really help you (but your guild-mates might, every time you login, ask them if there's been an annou recently). But for missing the dark blue 5 minute announcement in all the other chatter, I've written a bash script that you might like. It plays an audio file (a recording of me reading the announcement, in my case). It works on Linux as-is, under Mac OS X may require you to either install ogg123 or change that part to whatever audio player you prefer. For Windows, it should work in Cygwin, or maybe you could take the idea and implement it some other way.

#!/bin/bash
cd ~/.vendetta
tail -f errors.log | {
  while true; do
    grep -il "\[20[12]\] .* convoy scheduled to depart from .* in five minutes." &&
    ogg123 ~/.vendetta/voices/ctc-itani-five_minute.ogg;
  done ; }

Also, I'm working on expanding this idea to a more full-featured voice-communication system, although that's been going awfully slow (sorry). See: http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/9/8567

Cool script Beolach.

1) I don't care either way, really, so long as I'm not taking any actual damage.

2) I kind of like the realism involved in being able to miss the announcement. This way we either miss it, or we are forced to interact with the rest of our nation in a way that begins to approach role-playing.

pardon me for being ignorant, but how would one implement that bash file?

Create a text file containing it, and set it to be exucutable, and run it. It's a script for *nix OSes, like Linux or Mac OS X. Under Windows, you would have to install Cygwin, which is a *nix like environment that runs under Windows. If you're not already familiar with it, it's probably not worth the effort to learn, just for my dinky little script. But if you've ever thought you'd like to learn how to work in a *nix environment, this could be a nice place to start. ;-)

I'm on "os x" and familiar with terminal navigation and usage, as well as java programing. I've not done much with scripts though, so a little guidance would go a long way. Basically does it run in VO? what is the tag for executable in mac? .app? again pardon my ignorance. Lastly in os x could i or would i use itunes or is there a much faster simpler damon in terminal you would recommend.

That script would need to be HEAVILY modified to work in OS X. I don't reccommend trying it.

I don't use Mac OS X myself, but what all wouldn't work? I've heard that ogg123 doesn't come w/ OS X, but I think it could be installed, or replaced by a different audio player. And I don't know where Vendetta writes the errors.log file, but other than that I'd think that the script would work. OS X does include tail & grep by default, doesn't it?

You'd need the actual location of the Vendetta errors.log file, a scriptable replacement for ogg123, and some syntax cleanup before I'd use it. If I have time, I'll look that stuff up on my powerbook later.

ogg123 works fine with os x x11

We're aiming for things in the default install, not something that requires download and install.

well you could use osascript to get at iTunes, I'm not sure if there is a more direct way but something like

osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to (not sure of the apple script syntax from here) play something'

You can use osascript to control anything apple-scriptable from a shell script.