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Well, I just installed it, and while I find the TE chatpack good, I'd like to tweak it a bit.

See, I just can't understand why Defend! is on 'da; 'dd is more logical as it repeats the menu keystroke, so to become the "general item" of it ('aa Attack 'dd Defend 'nn Need someone to pickup pods 'yy Read The Chat 'rr Roger, etc)

Or, why different items for Inbound ('ii) and the inbound menu ('in)? Wouldn't it be more logical to have inbound as ('iii) where ('ii) is for the inbound menu?

Since though those changes are really my own minimal bitches and you'd better be working on the netcode /mrgreen.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="mrgreen.gif" /> , I'd just like to know how do you tweak a chatpack?

The voicechats are defined in two files: sounddef.mdl and quickchat.mdl. Both are plain text and can be edited with your favourite textfile editor, e.g. Notepad.

Sounddef.mdl only associates the wave files with internal identifiers, so you don't have to change it if you just want to change the menu layout.

At the end of quickchat.mdl, the menus are defined. You can simply move lines around there, just make sure to keep the syntax valid, in particular the commas are a common source of problems.

It all starts with the definition of an identifier called "mainMenu". mainMenu defines a list of QuickChatMenuItems, each of them having an associated button ('1'), a text ("Affirmative!") and a reference to another identifier. This is either a VC (YesCommand) or a submenu (attackMenu). In the case of a submenu, there is an analogue menu definition above.

I think you'll be fine with this, but feel free to ask if you still have problems. (Or contact me directly via IM/IRC.)

To learn the syntax, you may want to look into Ksero's MDL-documentation. (I'd link to the post here, but it seems to be gone. So use this link for now.) If you have basic programming language knowledge, I'm sure you'll be able to just learn the necessary syntax by looking at the existing menu definition, though.
If your syntax is not valid, Alleg will most likely simply crash without giving an error message, so I suggest you use the MDLSyntaxChecker before trying it in Alleg. (Again, I'd link to the post, but it's gone. So use this for now.)
You could also use the AllegianceVCPluginLibraryDemo for testing your new menus. (Again, use this for now.)


-- Cort

I've also had Ksero's stuff online since I helped our resident tiger with a few Knowledge Base entries.

It's here

As a warning, several of the tabs are very large, so the fact that I made them javascript sortable with column clicks makes "From C++ Exported to MDL" and "Imports from MDL to C++" a bit slow.