Chat and commands
Chat
Press Enter to open the chat line above the minimap. Type, then press Enter again to send. Esc closes the line without sending.
A plain line goes to your team. To talk to everyone, start the line with /all or hold Shift when you press Enter. A small tag at the left of the line tells you where it will go: Team, All, or Command when the line starts with /.
Sent lines show in the message log, with the channel and the player's name in the player's colour, for example [Team] Player 1:. A line can have 200 characters. In a game at one computer you are the only one who reads it. Over a network, the same line goes to the right players.
Where messages appear
Everything the game says is one quiet stream at the lower left, above the chat line, as small coloured text with a thin shadow and no boxes, each line stamped [mm:ss]. Chat shows [Team] or [All] and the name in the player's colour, then the words in white. Notices and developer notes (a line a map's script starts with DEV:) are orange, a loss such as a slain unit is red, a reward is gold, a warning is amber and an error is red. Identical lines in a row collapse into one with an x2. A line stays about eight seconds and then fades; rest the pointer on the stack to hold it. Only a rare big alert (victory, defeat) is shown as large centred text at the top. F12 shows the whole history, with a marker in the kind's colour before each announcement. An ally's chat line can also appear as a small speech bubble by their portrait.
Coloured text. Write (text)[#hex] and the words in the brackets show in that colour: This is (red)[#f00] text (three, four, six or eight hex digits). It works in chat, in game.Print and in every message in the log. In a message from the game, the name of a player shows in that player's colour.
While the line is open the game takes no other key: the hotkeys, the control groups, F3 and the arrow keys all belong to the chat. Opening the chat also shows the interface again if you had hidden it with Ctrl H.
| Key in the chat line | Does |
|---|---|
| Enter | Sends. With Shift it goes to everyone. |
| Esc | Closes the line. |
| Backspace | Deletes a character. With Ctrl it deletes a word. |
| Up, Down | Pick a command in the list. With no list, recall the lines you sent before (the last 50). |
| Tab | Completes the picked command. |
Slash commands
A line that starts with / is a command. As you type the name, a list opens above the line with up to six commands that match. It matches names that start with what you typed first, then names that contain your letters in order, so sw finds spawn. Each entry shows the name, its arguments and a line of help. The list closes once you type a space after the name.
Command names are not case sensitive. A command you mistype gets a line in your log saying so.
| Command | Does |
|---|---|
/help |
Lists every command you can use here, the map's own included. |
/all <text> |
Sends the text to everyone. |
/fps |
Cycles the debug overlay: compact, detailed, off. Same as F3. |
/hideui |
Hides or shows the interface. Same as Ctrl H. |
Those four work everywhere. The rest are cheats.
Cheats
Cheats are commands to the simulation. It applies them only in a game at one computer, which is what you have today. In a networked game they are off, and a cheat then answers "Cheats are off in this game." They are meant for testing a map. /help hides them where they are off.
| Command | Does |
|---|---|
/gold <amount> |
Gives you gold. A negative number takes it away. |
/reveal |
Shows you the whole map from now on. |
/spawn <unit> [count] |
Puts units of that definition on the ground under the pointer, for you. The name is the definition's name from the Objects module, in any case, and it may have spaces: /spawn Dark Ranger 3. A last word that is a number is the count (1 to 50). A lone number is read as a name. If the pointer is not over the ground, the units appear in the middle of the view. |
/kill |
Kills the selected units, whoever owns them. |
/instant [on|off] |
Training and building finish at once. With no argument it switches. |
/speed <x> |
Game speed, from 0.1 to 8. 1 is normal. |
/level <1-10> |
Sets the level of the selected heroes. |
/mana <amount> |
Sets the mana of the selected heroes, at most their pool. |
/kill, /level and /mana need a selection and say so if you have none.
Commands from a map
A map adds its own commands from Go with game.Command. They show in /help and in the completion list, with the arguments and help text the script gave them. When you run one, the rest of the line goes to the script as one string, and the script runs on every computer in the game. See Commands and interface and the map interface tutorial.