Over the past few months, the team has been working on overhauling our chat system to give developers more power over their in-game chat system. Today, we’d like to officially introduce you to our new API designed to make it much easier for developers to modify various chat features in their games, such as custom chat channels, chat bots, chat window re-sizing, and much more!

Our community is already using our new chat system, and they’re seeing some great success. If you’re in need of some inspiration, check out these creative examples.

There are three different components to this chat system: the server side, the client side, and the chat modules. If you’re familiar with ControlScript and CameraScript, this new chat system can be installed and modified quite similarly. During runtime, three objects are created (ChatServiceRunner, ChatModules, and ChatScript) and are inserted into various places in the datamodel unless pre-existing objects with their specified names are present. Developers can now overwrite these components to add cool features in their game or customize various aspects to their liking, such as font size, text colors, and more.

We’ve prepared documentation about the design of our new chat system, and how you can use it to add more features to your game. You can read through the Wiki article by clicking here.

Further down the road, we’re planning to continue revamping the chat system to enhance the performance on mobile devices, as well as provide developers with even more functionality. We’re continuing to build a framework that’s going to open a greater range of possibilities for robust in-game chat systems, and we can’t wait to reveal more information soon.