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ChatBlade is an MMO middleware for handling client side chat in (massively) multiplayer environments. I am looking for a royalty-free, cheaper (<1k) alternative (C++ or dll preferred) that would do the same before deciding on having to spend time developing an own solution.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

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2 Answers

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Can't you just use XMPP? It's weak for transmiting binary data in-band but you may not need this on an in-game chat.

You can run ejabberd on your server and just embed a jabber client on your game.

There's a list of libraries implementing XMPP here. gloox is a C++ implementation.

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It's not so much the protocol we're looking for, more like the client side convenience of having chat history, configurable slash commands, fantasy language support, command stubs, item hyperlink support, etc.. It might not sound like much but these add up and having this ready would save us considerable time right now. – konradkiss Mar 4 '11 at 20:05
@konradk I think you might not find an existing – Vitor Braga Mar 4 '11 at 20:36
Thank you, I too believe this to be the case. – konradkiss Mar 5 '11 at 2:20
@konradk One possible option is trying to refactor an existing IRC client into a client for your game. ircII is BSD licensed and written in C. You can just run any ircd on your server. Maybe writing an in-game front end for ircII is going to be easier than writing an library that satisfy all of your needs. – Vitor Braga Mar 5 '11 at 2:31
Thank you, this sounds like our best bet. – konradkiss Mar 5 '11 at 10:49
up vote 3 down vote

As the developer of ChatBlade we don't know of any current competitors. Many MMOs can ship with excellent, hand rolled chat such as Rift or SWG, but other AAA titles such as Age of Conan or DC Universe Online release with broken chat and can lose subscribers due to this.

Before creating ChatBlade I worked on Chat for another MMO initially using IRC. The public IRC source I found at the time was terrible. Incredibly ancient C (so old the parameter types were put after the parentheses in the function declarations). A message would go in and sometimes take 5 minutes to come out, from a server across the room. If you go with an IRC base try and use a more modern release.

If you are interested in ChatBlade we can offer deferred payments or other pricing flexibility.

Full ChatBlade documentation is online so if you want to use that as an outline to roll your own Chat, feel free as well.
http://www.chatblade.com/

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thank you very much for taking the time to respond. Since we were constrained by time, we had to roll a temp solution. (not based on irc or jabber) I'm sure that many indie developers would be interested in being able to access Chatblade through deferred payments or through new license options. As soon as we can spare the manpower to integrate Chatblade, I'll let you know. It is still the preferred solution of course. – konradkiss May 22 '11 at 17:37

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