An attempt at improving Factorio's built in chat.

Recommended to be combined with Twemoji or Fluent Emoji (or both)

Emojipack

The main reason I made this mod, is to add support for discord style emotes. eg: :purple_heart: -> 💜

This functions by other mods calling remote.call("emojipack registration", "add") with the mod name and a dictionary of shortcodes and their tags. I recommend using [img=<type>.<item>] rather than [<type>=<item>] as it looks significantly nicer in chat.

Scripting

To print a permanent message instead of letting Better Chat clear it away, use remote.call("better-chat", "send", {}) <br>The arguments are:

• message - LocalisedString : The contents of the message.
• level - historyLevel : Whether the message is intended for "global" broadcast, everyone on some "force", everyone on a "surface", or a specific "player".
• recipient - uint : Either the player, surface, or force that recieves it if the send_level was not global.
• color - Color? : The base color of the message.
• process_color - boolean? : Whether or not the message is faded out by the player's settings. Defaults to false.
• skip_print - boolean? : Whether or not the added chat is printed at all. This will also skip any sound. Defaults to false.
• This was intended to be able to preserve the output of commands with less jank.
• clear - boolean? : Whether or not the chat is cleared before printing the new message. Defaults to true.
• sound - defines.print_sound? : If a sound should be emitted for this message. Defaults to defines.print_sound.use_player_settings if clear is false. Otherwise defaults to defines.print_sound.never.
• sound_path - SoundPath? : The sound to play. If not given, UtilitySounds::console_message will be used instead.
• volume_modifier - float? : The volume of the sound to play. Must be between 0 and 1 inclusive. Defaults to 1

Compatibility

For easy compatibility, you can just use this code snippet and turn every object.print(message, settings) into compat_send(object, message, settings).

---@type boolean?
local has_better_chat = nil
local send_levels = {
    ["LuaGameScript"] = "global",
    ["LuaForce"] = "force",
    ["LuaPlayer"] = "player",
    ["LuaSurface"] = "surface",
}
--- Safely attempts to print via the Better Chatting's interface
---@param recipient LuaGameScript|LuaForce|LuaPlayer|LuaSurface
---@param msg LocalisedString
---@param print_settings PrintSettings?
function compat_send(recipient, msg, print_settings)
    if has_better_chat == nil then
        local better_chat = remote.interfaces["better-chat"]
        has_better_chat = better_chat and better_chat["send"] or false
    end

    if not has_better_chat then return recipient.print(msg, print_settings) end
    print_settings = print_settings or {}


    local send_level = send_levels[recipient.object_name]
    ---@type int?
    local send_index
    if send_level ~= "global" then
        send_index = recipient.index
        if not send_index then
            error("Invalid Recipient", 2)
        end
    end

    remote.call("better-chat", "send", {
        message = msg,
        send_level = send_level,
        color = print_settings.color,
        recipient = send_index,
        clear = false,

        sound = print_settings.sound,
        sound_path = print_settings.sound_path,
        volume_modifier = print_settings.volume_modifier
    })
end

Todo List:

• [ ] Add nicknames