(Of course I'm sure this has been suggested already :P)

I think that there should be more dialog addons such as treeviews, dropdown lists with icons, etc. In the same kind of fashion that some of the popular dll addons such as MDX and DCX allow you to do. On top of that, the dialog should be a bit more customizeable, for instance being able to change the colors of various dialog id's.

It just makes sense to me, since lots of scripters wind up using these dlls to make their dialogs more 'user-friendly', that they would be built in features in mIRC.

I think i've mentioned compilling DCX into mIRC a few times lol. It's not like it would be the first third party stuff being added to the source :P

It would definitely be nice to have those abilities... especially font, font color and font size. I've only done a few scripts that use those things because I don't like having to package a DLL with a small script just to make the script look nice. It just makes it too big for a small script. Of course, if everyone had the DCX and MDX DLL files already, then it wouldn't be a problem, but I don't like to rely on that.

Having it built in would be wonderful.

The main problem with including such a big project into mIRC is that it's in constant evolution (it's not perfect yet and bug less) and since the releases of mIRC are so far apart now, it would be hard to add new stuff to it.

I think that Khaled created the possibility for mIRC DLLs to remove that drawback of having too much to do in mIRC and help him concentrate on the essential part of it.

DCX is a very big project and is a DLL that is now larger than the initial scope of only enhancing dialogs. It has custom popup support, docking support and other misc features.

I agree that some of those features could be present in mIRC, but leaving them open to external libraries removes the burden of trying to please to everyone. mIRC is after all an IRC client for chatting before a complete development environment. The scripting was added to enhance the experience, but I think the scope has largely exceeded its initial vision.

Oh, I agree and I didn't really mean to include all the features of DCX and MDX in mIRC. There are a few (font-related, such as color, size and typeface) that I would really like to see, though. Having the ability to also include mouseover help bubbles would also be nice for a built-in feature. I think those are dialog features that many would use regularly. Other DCX/MDX features are great, but may not be used regularly by very many people, so should really stay as DLL-based.

For me personally it has to be one of the other, i'd hate if a small new feauture in mIRC broke DCX.

Why would it break DCX if mIRC added font colors, etc.? Obviously, people would probably start using mIRC's internal font method instead, so they didn't have to load the DLL if that was all they needed, but I don't see how it would break the DLL. You should be able to use both methods in one script without an issue...?

You see, mIRC 6.2 already broke a feature in DCX concerning custom popup menus from mIRC (the status, channel, query and nicklist ones). The menubar one is unaffected. Khaled knows about it and said he would try to make it so that the old method is used again so we could regain the possibility to use this feature (we couldn't find a workaround so far).

On another note, mIRC can add whatever it wants to dialogs and it won't affect DCX because the DLL is completely independant of mIRC dialog controls. DCX manages everything on its own and has its own version of the mIRC regular controls because its easier to manage everything in a generic way inside DCX than to try to mangle around mIRC controls like MDX was doing. Overall, DCX commands don't affect mIRC handled controls and mIRC commands don't affect DCX controls (I think you could do some /did on DCX control IDs but the result would be unknown).

And you can use DCX controls with mIRC controls on the same dialog but there are limitations as using CLA for example which doesn't support mIRC controls.

Overall, anything that's added to mIRC is a good thing for users in the dialog space. DCX was only created to palliate the needs of people wanting more advanced features to fully exploit the available GUI in Windows. And the release cycle of bug fixes/new stuff is faster in DCX than mIRC as we all know.

I still need to put DCX to use in the game I started long ago for the internal chat between players. Just haven't been feeling like working on it lately.