Controlling the Chat Size?

Is there any way to control what size the chat window size? My game is designed to run with a 720px width. (I checked Nonoba Racer to find out the maximum game area size because I couldn't find details for it elsewhere, and it runs with a 750px game width)

I had my project set to 920px to allow 200px for the chat area, and all looked fine on the development side. When I uploaded the game however, the upload form told me that I needed to drop the width to 850px, which I then did. Now when I access the game online, it's got a game area of 650px, and a chat size of 330px. How can I force the chat size to be 260px wide?

erm... "Is there any way to control what size the chat window -is-?" :o

Oh, and another thing that doesn't make sense to me... The upload form tells me the swf cannot be more than 850px in width, yet the size of the flash window the game runs in is 980px wide. What's up with that?

It might be possible for me to locate and abuse the chat control into being 260px by finding the object the API added to the stage (depending on if it's able to dynamically resize its controls if I change the width), but then I'd need to change the project's width to 980px, and remember to change it back to 850px before uploading it. So, that option isn't sounding too great.

your game should be 600px + 200px which is 800px in total.

For example newgrounds limits you to 800px in width.

The 200px seems to be the minimum for nonoba chat.

So the largest width you can go with is 600px for now...

Cool, thanks, at least that gives me a max size to work with... I think Nonoba racer is cheating then. ;) I guess this leaves me with two options:
A: Remove the chat and implement it myself in the context of the game
B: Live with a 600x600 window

To the Nonoba guys: It would be cool if you could give us more fine grained control over the chat. There's generally two types you'll see in games. The list like it is now, or ingame chat where you use a keyboard shortcut and then type a message. If the list could be moved, resized, skinned, etc, it would then fit with the game more easly. In the case of ingame chat, you could provide a SendToChat() hook, and a lightweight list control without a background (only the text) containing the chat messages. The last thing would be being able to set a timeout on those messages, and have old messages fade away, as typically, ingame chat is layered over the game somewhere, so you don't want a persistent list.

While it's great having the built in chat control, it takes up some serious screen real estate. So either I need to reimplement it, or squish my game a bit.

Lastly, how would I re-implement the 'Return to lobby' and 'Create new game' buttons? Should I just direct the user to the game's base URL?

Nonoba Racer is indeed cheating as it's not even using the API besides the lobby.

As of now the chat client will minimum have a size of 200px likewize it is none skinable and cannot be removed. We do however know that this is a really bad limitation and we are looking into skinning of the entire process (including but not limited to the chat and lobby interfaces)

As of the release of 1.5 you can push content into the chat however, hence you could make a separate interface for adding things to the chat field, but there is no "easy" way to do so.

My suggestion as of now, is to squeeze your game a bit, as some of the other options are simply not a possibility.

Well... the following hides the chat window, I'd just need to add a little timeout before calling it to allow the login screen fadeout to complete:
var loader : DisplayObjectContainer = stage.getChildAt(1) as DisplayObjectContainer;
loader.visible = false;

However, if you change the way your loader works, it could potentially break. Also, do you have a policy that the chat must stay in the game? If so, I'll leave it there.. I'm just exploring my options. ;)

actually there is a way to remove the chat but i use it only for fullscreen support in embedded mode.

chris, will nonoba start supporting fullscreen on site? :)

Well you can always hack around to get rid of the Chat, but basically it has marketing value for us so its not permitted as of now.. We might chance that later, but for now its not an option.

Basically we will remove games trying to do things to the API it was not meant to.

Alright, thanks for the info. 600x600 it is then. :)

Not sure it came across clearly in my above messages, but we are looking into insuring that games can control the chat to a larger extend, such as make the chat autohide, have a fixed width, etc etc.

On my game the chat window seems to be taking up more than the 200px mentioned here... How do I ensure that it only takes up 200px? Or are the changes mentioned directly above going to come into effect soon (i.e. in the next week)?

Thanks!

The 200px are for external sites - if you want full width on nonoba simply make your game as big as nonoba allows.

@demonic780 >
The chat is a very important part of any multiplayer game - and should not be disabled.

Regarding the voice chat - I get why you would want to do that, but your users might not have a mic etc. We really prefer the chat to stay there.

We know its ugly and such so we are working on making it much more flexiable.

Regarding the alternative - there is already API calls in place to disable the chat :)

Hello. Sorry for resurrecting such an old thread, but I feel its important to me. Can we now control the chat size? If so, please tell me how. Thanks