Forums Feature Suggestions Graphical 'smilie' support in mIRC

I don't join channels of those type, let me make myself more clear:

Knowing mIRC supports simlies is lame, I thought I made that clear before, but apparently I didn't.

I'm not for it either but as I said earlier if it can be switched off there's nothing to argue about. Indeed, it is saddening but it could attract more users, who then register thjeir copy of mIRC which will enable Khaled to go on developing and supporting mIRC.

I really don't think they'd think they're 'leet' just because they can use smilies. I use MSN (not with mIRC for obvious reasons) I constantly use their smilies to express what kind of mood I am in when having to look at posts like these and argue against them. I don't think I am 'leet', I don't think I'll ever be 'leet'. And, I don't want to be 'leet'.

Using smilies don't make you idiots, everyone is an idiot in their own way, hand on my heart I have done idiotic things and I expect most of you have too.

Smilies and mIRC don't mix? Has it ever been added? No, so how could you possibly know if they mix or don't mix?

Don't forget if it's a feature to be added, a few others and myself have said it'd need an on|off switch. And also, if it hadn't occured to you it can also be removed if there are complaints. /setlayer was removed so I'm sure Smiley support can also be removed.

So, call you greedy / selfish? Yes I do, how long has this thread been here? SInce 2003, it must be a popular feature to be added.

* Andy takes a deep breath and sighs.

You can script it, so it has been added in a way, i've tried mirc with similies, i'd rather use bitchx than use a client with similies

Cool where can I download it from!?!?!?!?!?

lol
well if these smilies and crap get added, you could
probably download mIRC here before too long.

That's where I thought I downloaded it originally.

Oh, the Joys of youth! My previous computer to this one was a whopping 2Gb. My computer before then had a massive 80Mb drive. I always did like to overestimate what I needed.

Or are you one of these people who goes to buffets/smorgasbords and just piles your plate up even though you are not going to eat it all?

The point is: bloat is bloat. Why puff something up with code that is outside the original concept - a <text> IRC client?

Points agains smiley support:
- to be properly implemented, "special strings" will have to be sent across IRC. If anything addition than >:-{ is needed, then regular users will soon get very annoyed!
- mIRC should continue to look different than IM clients, otherwise it might be confused as an IM client as well as a file trading client.
- The extra code is bound to be the subject of numerous "bug" complaints. That is if it doesn't break something in the process.
- IRC [l]users will start sending smileys all the time just to get graphical pleasure. So much for "Chat".
- Not only will the graphical support be needed in the chat window (that is, mixing graphics with text) but who is going to design the smiley's?
- Will this require multi-text support?

- Finally, if such visually stimuli is needed, then perhaps you can code it. The loading of these scripts is then optional! This solves the best of both worlds - the regular users don't get the bloat and you (and anyone else who wants it) get the smileys!

Of course, what Khaled wants to do with his program is up to him.

Cheers,

DK

You failed to say how big your current hard drive is. Who cares if the pc before your previous one had only 80 mb? Our old home computer had 20 mb, but who cares, windows wasn't even out yet, so we sure as hell weren't running mIRC, so really, what's your point?


When people start with personal insults, it ususally means they are out of arguments. This turned out to be the case:


This really made me "lol". Code outside the original concept of a <text> IRC client? Maybe you forgot that mIRC has a scripting language, that can do things that have nothing to do with IRC. How do you rhyme that? Should we remove the scripting language as well, because it can and is used a lot for a lot non-IRC related things. I once made a snippet to eject a cd rom drive, this has nothing to do with IRC, so I suppose we should have never allowed COM support to be added. Oh, btw, you know mIRC can play audio files right? What does that have to do with IRC? mIRC has a /run command which lets you run an external app. It has support for picture windows... What does that have to do with IRC? People use sockets to connect to a website and retrieve data. Oh yeah that sounds very IRC related! Quick, someone, tell Khaled to remove all these features, because Darwin Koala says they are not within the original concept of a <text> IRC client. [/sarcasm]


Oh the horror, 2 mb space taken again! If the option of smilies is disabled (did you read it? disabled) then your mIRC is not going to be any (yes any) slower, since it's disabled. Gotta love those on/off switches.


What on earth are you talking about special strings? I don't know if you are aware of it, but smilies are already widely used for years on IRC with all their different textual representations. I don't think we need new strings to represent the smilies we've been using for years. No extra strings are required, no extra load on the IRC server, since it would just be translation of : ) : D : P :] :[ :\ etc etc.


What? Who is to say what mIRC should continue to look like? So what if an IM client supports smilies. Smilies have become a big part of your every day textual communication, you could consider it as a little language where different signs have a different meaning. When you use a smiley, you communicate something, that sounds IRC related, don't you think? Especially since it's already like that for soo many years. I often put one smiley at the end of the sentence, to denote how the sentence should be interpreted. After all, in text based communication it is harder to know how you should interpret a sentence, whereas in oral communication, the intonation and tone of the person saying something, gives a lot of "meta" information about the text. Smilies are my meta-information when I chat, whether that be on IRC, MSN, or when sending an sms to a friend with my cell phone.


I don't know if you have ever went through the versions.txt, but you'll see that every release is full of bugfixes with a couple of new features introduced. Some versions are even nothing but bugfixes. *G* introducing smiley support in mIRC might cause bug complaints? What else is new?


Uh, I'm confused here, aren't people already using smilies? The difference now is that they'd see it as actual smilies, while you continue to see their textual representation. Oh but you're saying they will use more smilies as before? I can imagine that with a few people, but I also realise it doesn't take long to /ignore someone, and if you're an op /ban someone for excessive use of smilies. If you want I'll give you a small code to detect excessive repeating of smilies, so that it'll be very easy to catch

So much for chat? Well the fact that mIRC is being widely used for file serving must surely tick you off, you ought to start a petition to remove DCC from mIRC so that it can't be abused for mass file trading. Oh wait, but didn't Khaled say that sending files is part of communication like pictures of friends etc. and that he doesn't like that it is abused, but that it's no reason to remove DCC support from mIRC. Hmm I smell a parallel logic, do you?


Huh? What kind of argument is that? Of course it's mixed with text, where else would the smilies be visible? You are worried about who is going to design the smilies?


Multi-text support?


Uh, everyone in this thread agrees that it should be optional, so what's your point? What is this bloat you keep referring to if it is disabled. Think of it as a script, you've made a huge bloated script, which is captured in between #groups. Well you disable the #group, and guess what? mIRC ignores the code between the #groups, cool huh?

There will have to be some kind of if statement to determine the state of that switch...


I think he means a special way (some strange characters or so) to prevent "item : price" showing up like "item :tongue:rice", or reducing the likelihood of such occurrences.


A channel window is not a picwin in mIRC 6.16, not because Khaled actively refuses us the possibility to draw lines all over our backlog, but because it's a lot easier and faster to code and to execute that code. Scrolling back in some channels where people drown their messages in color codes is already slow on my computer, I'm afraid graphics will not improve that.


mIRC still needs to parse everything in the file, otherwise it won't find the end of the #group and anything behind it that's not disabled. If I send you to a big stadium or a big concert and tell you to only do something when you see some specific person, you're not doing nothing before you see him, you'll have your hands (eyes?) full checking every person to see if it's the one...


Conclusion: I'm not in favor of the suggestion, but since it's a lot of work for Khaled I don't think it'll appear soon anyways.

A single /if statement is completely unnoticeable (Speed-wise) by todays standards.



There's no need for that, most people that use smileys learn how to type out each smiley (Eg: :tongue: is : p), so they'll know item :tongue:rice is item: price anyway.



So you would be one of the people that don't have smiley support turned on.

Tell me you're not serious. Wow yeah that extra if statement is enough reason not to implement it because it'll slow down mIRC!!! Even in the scripting language, doing 1 if statement for a switch is instant, I'm thinking a compiled if statement is even faster. Please...


I know what he means, and my reply to him is that it's simply not necessary. So what if item:price will transform : p in a smiley? This is just the same in MSN, and is one of those things a person will have to cope with if they have smilies enabled. But this is of no importance to you, since you won't enable smilies anyway, so what do you care?


No doubt, scrolling back would slow down the computers, but once again, that is IF you have smilies enabled. If you don't like that it slows down the screen when scrolling, then don't enable smilies, what's so hard about that to understand?


Haha, the only thing to remember from my example is that if you have it disabled, the overhead will be minimum, not worthy to debate over even. Besides the concert example is hardly relevant. When the parser finds the first #group off, it just has to go line by line sequentially checking for the first word being #group, that's hardly intensive is it? Definitely not the same as dropping a person in some concert in the middle of a lot of people....

Here's a quick example:

In my main mIRC folder i have the entire versions.txt which is 10069 lines long, total of 464770 bytes.
We do a search for the text "First public release" which is the last string in the entire file.

//var %a = $ticks | .fopen versions versions.txt | .fseek -w versions First public release. | echo -a Time taken: $calc($ticks - %a) * Position in file: $fopen(versions).pos | .fclose versions

Time taken: 15 * Position in file: 464745

Result: It took 15 milliseconds on my computer and I can imagine this working even faster in compiled code. That's some overhead!!!! [/sarcasm]


Let's just ask Khaled to stop putting in new features, that way we are sure no extra if comparisons are necessary, so that mIRC doesn't get slower anymore!!!

Wow sarcasm galore :tongue:

PS: I don't know if you've ever used Klient (which does support smilies, or atleast last time I used it), but look what the author has to say about smilies and speed concerns:


Of course Klient and mIRC are two different IRC clients, but don't give people the impression it's going to cause heavy overload, when it is proven it can be programmed in a way where this isn't the case.

* It depends on how it's done, a single /if on mIRC startup is unnoticable, having to check it every line/byte might be noticable...

* It will always give trouble, either those darn images show up in all the wrong places, or people who didn't enable smilies get confronted with (L) (U) (@) (so) etc meaning all the weirdest stuff...

* I probably wasn't clear enough about the picwin situation. If mIRC has standard support for images in chat, all channel windows will become picwins. It would be too time consuming to support, maintain and update both the normal channel windows and picwins for channels for all releases, so the 'old' one will be dumped. This means that even if you turn those images off, you're still using a picwin. This means using some higher level programming language equivalent of /drawtext for all text, plus the conversion of all displaying in mIRC (/echo).

I doubt it would use an /if on each byte, it would most likely use an /if on each line which wouldn't be too bad.



I thought about that, that's why I suggested the default smiley set making sense for people with smileys disabled (Scroll up), no stupid stuff like *-p should be a smiley.



Just to be pedantic; just about every window on your pc can be drawn on if you create a compatible device context for it, so therefore everything is a picture window.

According to /help text copy and paste (See below) mIRC already uses a "Graphical window" for channel windows, etc, if this is true, it most likely uses TextOut() to print text already.

Quote:

mIRC already uses a "Graphical window" for channel windows

Well I'm sure it does, otherwise would you be able
to have a background image? I don't know. There
are worse things than smilies in mIRC I guess, especially
if it can be disabled and is disabled by default, I would
just hate to see him faggot mIRC up by adding stupid
kiddie crap like this. But what will be will be, I wouldn't
quit using mIRC over it or anything.

You can add a background image to a normal editbox/listbox/button/etc by using GDI.

Edit:

This is why mIRC makes learning a real programming language so hard, it makes a normal user assume that picture windows are actually a special type of window when they're actually no different to simple dialogs, the only thing that's different is the way mIRC implements them.

-General-

I don't really see why this thread was restarted, it was totally unnecessary and it's only contributed to yet another excessively long thread that repeats points of view described by several users in the past, including those that have posted here too!

I totally appreciate that conversation and debating on these boards regarding mIRC features is acceptable and indeed encouraged, but to be perfectly honest all I see now is arrogant attitudes and pointless bit-by-bit breakdowns of the last poster which will go on and on and on...

There are clearly two points of view on this topic, both being valid. Those that say people against Emoticons have "no reason" for being against them are incorrect, I see totally where they are coming from even if they do have difficulty articulating their point of view (or perhaps the pro-emoticon people have difficulty interpreting it?) However, emoticon supporters also have a point. Nevertheless, points above and more have been posted numerous times before, which was the point of a sticky post being made about this particular suggestion.

All you need to do is read and wait for the next major version or two, whereby you'll likely have a fairly good view of whether emoticons are going to be added or not.



Regards,

I think people are to stuff in their ways, fundamentalists of a sort. I think for MIRC to flourish eventually new features will need to be added. They don't have to be used but having them as "Official plugins" would be useful. So like when you install MIRC it has those on/off boxes so you don't have to install these plugins with it. Myabe something along the lines of.

1) Foreign language packs

2) Smilie packs

3) Xdcc browser (although with the official line on file sharing this is unlikely)

4) Pictures that go with registered accounts, like what cheeta chat added to Yahoo messenger (my sister used it, that actually is the truth but sounds so lame it hurts)

5) That easy script designer that is in the process of being made.

6) Easy video and voice chat

) Out of the box ideas... for instance I heard that Second Life uses some kind of mozilla implementation in it's engine.

But the key idea is *** You aren't forced to install anything you don't want to so that the purists don't complain

Any ideas or comments?

If you support certain feature suggestions, you should say so on the posts about those specific features. Commenting on them all in this thread isn't likely to get much notice.

And, do try to keep your opinions on what others believe to yourself. If you don't agree with someone, that's fine. However, there is no need for name calling or criticizing those who have differing opinions.

Personally, 1 and 5 are useful additions for people. For the rest, I've made my opinions known in other threads and won't get into it here. Feel free to read those other threads.

And, as a final comment... You're right that 3 will most likely never happen. XDCC is used almost exclusively for warez/movies/mp3s these days. Support of XDCC in any way is not very likely.

i think the issue here is, if they come 'packaged' in the installer, it can be argued that mIRC would therefore be supporting those addons in some way shape or form. Now, from here on in, Khaled has had a very tight watch on everything that goes into his program, as the only developer on the project (besides Tjerk for the help file documentation). The problem with supporting these addons is that, as with any addon from an anonymous source, you really can't guarantee the stability of those addons (in future versions). You can say that Khaled is a bit of a control freak here, with reason. The more addons you have in a program from different sources, the higher the risk of another exploit in the program-- something he surely does not want. Sure, Khaled can mess up and put bugs into his own program, but atleast he knows that who is responsible, etc. There is therefore really no need to go through the headache of a possible 'mishap', when the other option is very simple: Allow the user to find/install the addons himself, releasing [most of] the responsibility of a faulty script from the hands of Khaled himself. And this solution is very simple indeed with things like search engines.

Sorry to bump this thread - I got pointed here by the sticky thread on the front page.

I'm also a purist who believes text is text. I use plain text in e-mail whenever possible, don't like graphics intensive web sites, and disable graphical smileys in my IM clients. I would therefore never ever enable such a feature in mIRC (I use good ol' Merlin because I'm visually impaired and he helps me by reading the text out loud). However, I have no problem with people who would enable it themselves - personal choice. But please do not put in in the main installer!!

If you bload the main exe file by 3 meg, you'll likely bloat the installer package (Which I have to download) by up to 3 meg as well - especially if you're going to include default bmp or gif files as well. An extra 3 meg will eat into my usage cap on ADSL, and/or take extra time to download on my dial-up line - which costs money.
You people in the states who all have super-fast uncapped DSL/Cable connections seem to forget what it's like in a third world country where one way or the other you pay for every bit you download.

Cheers
Grakul