being able to adjust the size of the text will be very nice. when using a larger monitor, the text can be very small and hard to follow.
looking forward to it.......

Do people currently use the textured (non-alpha) background at all?

Is the current scrollback (250, or 249, lines) sufficient? I can easily make the number of lines a user-settable option.

Would it be too much to ask for italicized text? It's hard to express emphasis with caps 

Already done (or actually I just checked and it is not working 100% yet -- it works when you type it in but for some reason isn't modifying the output). ATM we use colour for emphasis because of our limited fonts.

So, as in the NPC and book GUIs, green text denotes italics and yellow text denotes bold. You toggle these with ~ and |. (There is also gold toggled with ` (SENTInce uses this for intetitles)).

When we use proper fonts we can make this real italics, bold, and underline.

EDIT:

Currently (by default) we use INSERT and DELETE to scroll the message textwindow up/down by one line and PAGEUP/PAGEDOWN to scroll the chat.

This seems backwards as by default the chat window is on the left of the screen and the message window is on the right. So this should reflected in the key layout, rather than having the opposite.

But also, ATM we just scroll by one line (with the keyb anyway, the mouse can scroll in larger steps). If, as we will be able to in B5, we can have very large scrollback buffers, this makes little sense.

One more sensible layout would be: INS/DEL scrolls the chat window by one line, PGUP/PGDN scrolls the chat window by one page, and HOME/END goes straight to the top/bottom of the chat window. If SHIFT is held down, operate on the message window instead.

Obviously currently SHIFT opens the inv, but this can (indeed should) be changed (so for example, I (can be rebound like any other key) would toggle inventory mode).

Alternatively we can use ALT to change textwindows (ALT is not needed for running in B5) to avoid this minor conflict right now.

Opinions?

EDIT: I've done it like this:

There are 6 new ?M_ commands: ?M_TEXTWIN_LINEUP, ?M_TEXTWIN_LINEDOWN, ?M_TEXTWIN_TOP, ?M_TEXTWIN_BOTTOM, ?M_TEXTWIN_PAGEUP, and  ?M_TEXTWIN_PAGEDOWN.

These can be bound to keys in the normal way. When the key is pressed, the given action is performed on the chat window. If SHIFT is held down, the action is performed on the message window.

The existing ?M_PAGEUP/DOWN(_TOP) are retained to keep people who don't like change relatively happy.

So by default, the new ?M_TEXTWIN_* commands are bound to INS/DEL, HOME/END, and PGUP/PGDN, and the old commands are unbound.

This means that new players get the more powerful scrolling but existing keys.dat files will still work.

B5+.

Currently when you logout the 'mix' window (chat and messages in the same window) is displayed. This is not scrollable.

Although I've removed the mix window entirely (because it meant twice the work and twice the memory usage every time a message/chat is displayed), it's not a problem to simply display both the message and chat windows side by side at this point.

I can also make them scrollable even here. Thus allowing players to logout and review the text.

Howver, is this useful, given that you can already create textfile logs of everything?