you all know what I am talking about. A sight blocking and uncomfortable playerslist, the upcoming panic, when more than one person is chatting with you and the missing copy&paste capability and other limitations of the Freelancer chat.
I am well aware of the fact that the chat is all coded into the game and that we have no way to alter the source code.
But there is another way!
Overlays are the magic. Like Steam and Windows Live use them. Naturally applications are launched within these environments to gain and keep control over them. Otherwise the overlays wouldn't be there as the application(Freelancer) always stays on top.
But we don't have to implement such thing like Steam or Windows Live. Have a look how Fraps works. So basically, we have to hook up our own DLL to Freelancer on it's start up to use our own overlays.
Everything would be possible. the playerlist could be extracted from this page or live from the server. We could implement a friend list, could have multiple small chat windows, have copy&paste support and even more. One unchangeable but neglect-able limitation would be the maximum length of a chat message would still be limited to the same as before.
So the only thing that we need, is someone capable of doing it...:crazy:
I have had a semester C++/CLI but my main area of expertise is Java.
Is there anyone that is interested into digging further into it?
I made dx 8 rendering hook DLL that hooks EndScene call within IDirect3DDevice8 interface. it can be used to render your custom GUI, text or whatever on the screen after FL rendering ends. but obviously you would need some GUI code or lib. So yea, overlays are possible in FL it's no secret.
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