Well, it wouldn't be a week in Paragon City if I didn't have some new questions and desires.
Today's topic is chat text color.
Let me state up front that I am assuming I'm going to be disappointed but nothing ventured, etc...
The short version - is it possible to alter the colors of the chat dialog text or are the colors hard-coded to correspond only to the channel colors listed in the channel selection list? When the game was live, the channels expected that Pet Dialog, Battle Damage, and Help messages, for instance, would each be different colors and you'd identify the source of the text in your current chat tab by its color. In Paragon Chat, the text in the current "channel" is colored the same as the channel title.
On a related note, is it possible to color individual bits of a chat balloon or is it hard-coded to be one foreground color and one background color for the entire chat balloon?
The attached picture shows what I want to do:
PCBot is sending this message body: "<color blue>Hello, %s</color> <color green>How's things?</color>"
As you can see, the color has no effect on the "Broadcast" channel text. PCBot's chat balloon defaults the whole sentence to the last color tag it received.
In an ideal world, what I want to do is arbitrarily color individual words, like so: "Hello, %s. There's been a lot of <color red>gang activity</color> recently and we could really use your <color red>help</color>." (The idea being that someone would say, "What gang activity?" and the bot would respond with more info about activities it wants the person to participate in.)
This actually works in non-chat related dialogs, as the Description in the upper-left illustrates.
Is there any way to make this work in chat as well, or does the client programming make this a no-go?
What if you marked up your chat text as if it was from one of the built-in channels, like "Pet Damage Received"? Would the game client give it the appropriate colors, and would it apply them to just the marked up text or would it apply to an entire message?