the current chat-text that is fading out is in lugre/lua/lib.fadelines.lua
i think it would be better if at least the bottom-most lines would stay without fading out. (not important right now, just a note)
about the commented out stuff : that is a relic from the beginnings of the journal code, it wasn't finished.
Also things like pickup item etc don't really appear in the original uo journal. (might be nice though)
here are all places where JournalAddText is called :
Code:
data/lua/net.other.lua:401: JournalAddText(text_charname,plaintext)
data/lua/net.other.lua:430: JournalAddText(text_charname,plaintext)
data/lua/net.other.lua:475: JournalAddText(unitext_name,unitext_message)
data/lua/obj/obj.player.lua:77: JournalAddText("","Be the peace with you!")
data/lua/obj/obj.player.lua:83: JournalAddText("","You go into War!")
the ones in net.other.lua are most interesting, those come directly from the network-packet handlers, and contain lots of info (text font, color...) that isn't fully used yet.
also the kPacket_Localized_Text one sends a textid which is looked up in the "cliloc" (localization, e.g. different languages) file, and substituted with parameters, this might be interesting to detect certain events, but isn't that important right now, i just wanted to mention it.
we currently ignore the font parameter completely, we don't use the uo fonts for text display.
"unitext_hue" in kPacket_Text_Unicode is probably the same as text_color in the other two packets (just inconsistent naming).
uo has a "hueing" system, a hue is basically a color-palette used to change the colors of a given image, but most hues have one primary color and the palette is just all shades of that color until black.
in this case you can retrieve the r,g,b value of the primary color using
local r,g,b = gHueLoader:GetColor(hueid - 1,31) -- get first color.
I'm not sure if the -1 is needed or not, just try and see =)
About more than one color in a textwidget : no, not implemented yet. It would also be nice to change font, text-size and boldness inside text, and maybe even include images, and support unicode as well, so i guess the most flexible way of doing that is using RTT to render the text once to a texture and then use the widget to just display it.
We haven't gotten round to implement that yet =)
EDIT : i just tried to enable attachments in this forum software, but i failed misearbly =\