Forums Bug Reports MS Agent broken since 6.3

Hello!

Microsoft Agent is probably not one of the most used features in mIRC, but I use it - a lot. If you turn off the voice, set the agent size to 10% and set up other options, you get nice notifications in always-on-top baloons, even when working or playing in other (full-screen) applications.

Recently I decided to upgrade, and noticed that MS Agent no longer shows notifications for channel and private messages. It seems the problem appeared in 6.3, as everything works fine in 6.21.

Thanks.

This seems to be working fine for me in mIRC 6.31 under Windows XP. If you test this with a clean copy of mIRC, with no scripts or add-ons, do you still see the same issue?

Hello Khaled,

You are right. This seems to be caused by a script (nexgen acidmax, I'm quite used to it), and most likely by the feature which intercepts incoming messages and "colorizes" them (it adds formatting to the nicks and brackets around them). I noticed because DCC chats aren't prettified this way, and MS Agent still works in DCC chats.

The formatting is an aesthetic element I'm quite used to; is it no longer compatible with MS Agent on purpose, or is there a workaround? I am not strong in mIRC scripting, but if you tell me what to look for, I can try to experiment with this.

Thanks.

I'll bet the actual colorizing has nothing to do with the problem here, but rather the fact that the script performs a "haltdef" to stop the default output, thereby also stopping the event before it reaches the agent.

If you try the following events (in a new remote file):



and then change it to:



You'll notice that the first will trigger the agent and the second will not.

I have not tested this in versions prior to 6.3, perhaps this is the behaviour that changed? I'm not sure if this was intentional, but I can see the reasoning for it... If so, you can add the command /speak $1- to your script to make the agent work as it used to:



You'll have to find this original event in your script, or you can add the following into a new file without having to edit your original script:



Of course, this is a little awkward. Perhaps mIRC should use pre 6.3 behaviour for this.

The scripting is very likely the cause of the issue. If I remember rightly, I changed the way /haltdef works in mIRC 6.31 so that it blocks all both sounds and speech.

The reason for this change is that in previous versions of mIRC the /haltdef command was inconsistent - it stopped sounds and speech for some events but not others. So I changed it to be consistent across all events.

The solution would be to add your own /speak commands for the particular events you are halting, as described in argv0's post.

Hello,

I am sorry to be a nuisance, however I can't seem to figure this out on my own. For one, I can't get /speak to work, which doesn't seem too susprising, as according to the fine manual, it is used to "send the specified text to Monologue (or Text Assist)", and doesn't seem to be related to the Microsoft Agent technology in any way.

Looking through the manual, I found the /gload and /gtalk commands. However, I can't get these to work either - commands such as "/gload myagent default" and "/gload myagent 1" all return errors ("/gload: error loading 'myagent' (merlin.acs)").

Any advice?

Am I doomed to search for a solution on my own, then?

The commands seem to be working fine here.

/gload myagent 1
/gtalk myagent This is an agent test
/gpoint myagent 100 200
/gplay myagent 20
/gmove myagent 300 100
/gunload myagent

-genius_at_work

They do not work on my PC at all.

Is there any way I could get more information to help resolve the problem?

I think to resolve the problem *we* need more information. Please describe what youre doing in more detail. Have you checked to see you're using the latest MS Agent software? What commands did you try in mIRC to get it to work?

hey argv0
what if I wanted to use it on ^1:input*:/gtalk -u default "you said" $1-

I want to halt the text it shows on my channel window when I talk
but the ^halt does not work on :input:

this is the text it shows that I wish to hide.
"* Agent 'default' talks: "you said"
it really makes a mess of my log file as well.

I thought I had it fixed before but I think it was a /gtalk flag or something?

didn't know if I should make a new topic about this or not
I just did a search and found something close to my problem.

You use /.gtalk to hide output. This is the convention for every builtin command and the behaviour has not changed, though perhaps the actual standard output for the agent has changed since 6.3 (and now shows stuff when used without the '.' prefix). This goes for many other commands, most notably /timer and /hadd. The '.' prefix hides output there too.