So, it's been just about 2 months since I started thinking about this project and now here I am:
• GUI works pretty well, still adding features there
• No other support except local hashed starcraft so far, but connects at least
• MOSTLY done with the configuration, still a few things to fix up.
• Rudimentary internal command processor.
• Dropped the customizable antiflood algorithm. Too complex, and besides: who's going to make them?
What I have left to do:
• Finish up the config, it's still pretty rough around the edges.
• Make the Listview's drag resizing a little more finished, right now I just have the resize itself and a cursor icon change.
• Find a way to redraw the richedit so the text doesn't blur with WS_EX_TRANSPARENT...
• Somehow fix my addchat so the richedit's caret doesn't hover above the crlf. This is so annoying when the focus is lost, resized, then it is redrawn.
• Fix the listview's items' back color to not use the null brush (-1, otherwise the background picture would be cut), but instead, do what visual basic does to redraw it.
• Add support for more clients
...
• Add support for external dll hashing (bncsutil.dll, checkrevision.dll)
• Add bnls support
• Add proxy support
• Add antiflood
• Add floodbot protection
• Add an about (and maybe even a help) dialog box.
• Add a chat log system. This should be very easy, and gone are the days of struggling to read the unformatted text! Read your logs the way you would on your bot, since they are now rich text formatted (rtf) files.
A great feature with this bot that I'm working on is to have an atmosphere. You can talk to people in different places. Not just a black box, with a list of people in a black box, and some text being displayed in a black box. Different channels now have different feelings to them. You can associate background pictures, fonts, font size, text color, etc with a certain channel. For example, Op HeLL's background pictures could be flames, and the text could be reddish, etc. It has a hellish theme. How appropriate for a channel called Op Hell! Theoretically is no limit to the number of custom atmosphere channels you could have, although my hash table's size is 64 entries. I have a few questions for you about this feature though:
1). Would you like it even?
2). Should I actually change the fonts and text color? I could imagine that would get annoying, and also hard for me to do since I would have to save the formatting and then reparse it when changing colors.
3). Should I save the channels in a single file called channels.atm (atm for ATMosphere)? Or should I have a directory filled with channelname.atm files? You could edit these files from notepad as well as through the GUI.
Another idea that somewhat sprouted from the listview's per-channel background: What if the listview image can be set by the clan's website? You specify the website to download the image from, and when you join the channel, it does. This is all made very easy by using the LVBKIF_SOURCE_URL flag in the ulFlags member of the LVBKIMAGE. Perhaps the same can be done for an extended "channel topic", as with IRC?
Overall, I think I made a lot of progress for typing like, 5 lines a night
!
