Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Symbols in Chat in Warhammer Online

I'd like to say I discovered this, however doing a search on "icons warhammer online" found a few other hits.

There is a library of icons and symbols that is in the WAR client, and its used by the minimap, the bags, the map, server announcements and the like. The symbols can be accessed by using "&lticon>" within a chat (it also works in email subject lines and probably contents). I'd love to know if it works in guild names (although there seems to be a bug in guild names currently -- we spent an hour trying to get a guild name accepted last night, for an alt alt guild built for fun scenario runs in T1 -- seems if you use more than one capital it fails, even though there are guilds in ALLCAPS as well as Guild Names Like This. Must be recent)

Way back in the early days of WAR (after release), an announcement popped up saying that Altdorf was now level 4. There were three stars at the end, and also "&lticon43" where the last star should have been. (memory is bad, so it may have been a different icon number)(also, I think there had to be a space between icon and the number, although this isn't the case now)

Icon43?

So I tried "/say &lticon43"
Well, that didn't work.

How about "/say &lticon43>"?
I got a star floating in my 'voice' bubble, and in the chat window.

I tried different numbers at random, and found a bunch: between 1 and 65 or so. I mentioned this in Guild and people had a bit of fun dropping random icons into the chat.

The problem at the time was that doing this caused issues for the chat text coloring: Text that should be blue appeared white, or half would be blue and half a different color. It effected anyone who say the symbol (so people at the other end of the chat weren't too impressed). So, I stopped trying it out.

...

Go forward a few months, and I try the icon thing again. And this time, it works fine, no bad effects. Someone in Guild tries "&lticon777> and it works... there's more than 60-odd??

I made a macro with &lticon10>&lticon11>&lticon12&gt...&lticon19> and ran it. Then changed the macro to &lticon20>&lticon21&gtetc. Then ran through them. I'm up to about icon300+ now. From around 200 on, the icons are bag items. They are also not the same size as in the bag window, so the icon must resize or my chat window font size is different to the bag window default.

I'm looking for a Clock symbol, and since I'm sure I've seen a watch in the past, should be there somewhere.

Icon 33 is a stop symbol. Icon 140-something is a hammer (theres a bunch of weapon symbols in a row in the mid-100s). And a clock, and I have "Stop-Hammer-Time".

...

Khalid is a 29 Rune Priest now, but I've also got Individual (21 White Lion), Telansa (20 Bright Wizard), Tact (22 Knight) and Cunning (6 Shadow Hunter). And Bigbadwolf, level three War Priest.

edit: i can't seem to fix the left bracket issue in this post

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Marty, this is really cool. Going to try it out. Thanks!