Hiding Player Chat Messages

Introduction
This tutorial will teach you how to make player chat messages invisible (and unhearable), while still allowing triggers to detect them.
Can be quite useful for some types of maps, like multiplayer RPG's.


Hiding the Chat Messages

1. Download GameInterface101.rar (Thanks to PitzerMike for the file) and extract the contents to your Warcraft III directory.
2. Run WorldEdit,open your map, and go to Game Interface.
3. Change [All], [Allies], [Observers], [Referees] and [Private] to a lots of spaces.
4. Create an empty file and import it to your map, change its path to "Sound\Interface\InGameChatWhat1.wav".
5. Player chat messages are now cannot be seen or heard, you can use the event to detect the hidden messages and display them if needed.

Tutorial Map
Download ChatTestMap.w3m

nifty, tried it in bnet?

Also tried it with the map with the imported thing is not the first map opened by wc3 ?

dont u know what war3mapSkin.txt is? its the file that is created by worldedit for Game Interface, so it works on bnet 100% every time.

This is cool. Good job :).

hmnn [framedef] seemed as stuff from other kind of files, wonder what else you can change with war3mapskin.txt

Oh wow. So cool. This eliminates people in DobRP to not have to say in observers chat '-say hi im a sad little boy'

Very interesting and useful.

Emm, either I am oblivious to something great... Or you are oblivious to something simple... At the beginning of the level just set the player names to variable (1 for each) and then wait 0.01 seconds and set every player name to a-hell-of-a-lot of spaces, when the names are needed just use the variables and at victory have a wait timer before it and set the names back to normal. Their is no point of doing the editing of an MPQ as far as I've noticed, if theirs something I'm missing please tell me.

Yes you are missing something, try to hover your mouse above a unit owned by player with such a space-filled name, or open the alliance dialog.

Added Tutorial Map

One constantly keeps editing the mpq when saving the map anyways. And this method doesn't have lame side effects

is it possible to switch back and forth from normal chat to this?, because if no one is near ur hero, ur kinda a loner..

err Isn't that kind of the point of it?

And the tutorial just covers disabling player chat messages, does not cover how you will abuse the feature

Very, very, very useful find. Rep ++

lol, what Immoralis said is what I'm wondering too. @_@

Well, since you are changing it with the MPQ editor(which I've tried to use, but got so confused it wasn't funny), it shouldn't be able to be changed during a game, right?

Where does the text appear? In the middle of your screen, or on your selected unit? What happens if you don't have a selected unit?

Hmm... if you only wanted your allies to see the text above your unit, could you do that?

Anyways, a nice tutorial. Never knew this was possible to do. :)

hmnn have you read the tutorial? Cause it is far from being about placing the text about the units, it is about hiding the chat messages.

If you for some reason want it to become some sort of an option, you can just detect chat messages and show them with Game - Show text message action.

And because of that you can make a chat filter really easily btw