I would like to add channels to combat window, like i am able to add to other windowes.

Even better if i would have a list about all the channels/dataflows and i could simply check the ones i want to direct to combat window. e.g. all forms of party report, spell progression and other combat related info.

This is not a bad idea; will dig deeper into this.

I would still like to have skill and spell messages fully in one window. Now my spells tell in general window that they are cast and the effect message goes to battle window. Like if i am cast cure light wounds at calmr the message that I have invalid target will go to battle window but the message that the spell is cast is in general window.

Thats one of the reasons i would like to choose what goes to combat and what does not.

Couple more reasons are that anything going to [party report] should go to combat window, as should spell progression (If i see the battleflags in different window, how should i know did i just meta or is this really a new battle round), near death messages are shown in general yet the killing happens in general, damage done is shown in combat but scanning the target sends the info to general.

Also, closely related, if i have 9 different windowes + combat, i need to make 9 different log files or othervise i loose 'em. I'd rather choose from that same list of channles that what all would be logged and all would flow to the same log file.

Managing channels was one of the first pieces of functionality that I looked at.

The supplied functions allow you to send text to a channel, and you can (probably should) indicate that this text should not be processed by triggers.

My initial plan was to use triggers to mark text with attributes that would determine which channel it was send to. I would use my own set of such triggers to supplement or replace the selection of text built into the client. I.e. I would choose which text would be sent to which channel and then use the standard client features to select which channels I wanted in which window. This would give the most flexibility.

However, there are some problems which make this kind of customization a bit awkward.

Firstly, there is the question how text flows from trigger to trigger and then to a channel and how this flow of text can be controlled. There is little documentation regarding this and there is little choice about where text is inserted into the flow.

This means it is difficult to make any scripts/plugins that dispatch text to custom channels work nicely with other, standard, scripts and triggers etc. It's easy to accomplish custom dispatching of text to channels that occurs as an independent addition to standard triggers. However, for text that will be processed by standard trigger functionality (regular triggers and simple scripts handled by the trigger manager etc), there's no way to choose which channels the, processed, text will ultimately be sent to.

Secondly, and probably more importantly, there is no way to enumerate all the windows and which channels are being selected. This means that there is no (easy) way to figure out if a particular "channel" will appear in the generic window and, therefore, no easy way to avoid duplication of text in the generic window. This duplication would occur when text is sent to multiple custom channels.

Also, since there is no way to interact with the built in selection of text for channels, duplication of text can occur when a trigger directs text to a single custom channel but the same text is also processed and directed to one of the standard (built in) channels.

I don't believe that much extra functionality in the client is required. It might be nice to allow some control over which text gets send to which channels (including the generic channel). However, if there was a good set of functions for inserting or extracting text at various stages in the processing pipeline and some way of checking which channels are being viewed in which windows, plugins could be relatively easily written to control the sending of text to various destinations (channels and windows).

Tim