[hendrikswa]

I would like to display a form to the player on the client that takes text input. Is this possible? I've done this with HL2DM before, but that was done with a VGUI form on the client side.

I wonder if the Type_File option from the MOTD tutorial isn't what I need, but I can't even get an example to work. If someone can place an updated tutorial on how to do a MOTD that guy will be everybody's hero!

This is what I've got for the MOTD message. It compiles, but it just does nothing. I've put a breakpoint in and it does get called

Please help me!! I've been trying to do this for the last month.

 
void SamplePlugin::ClientPutInServer(edict_t *pEntity, char const *playername)
{
ShowMOTD( "http://www.yahoo.com", "Yahoo.com !", 2, "", pEntity );
META_LOG(g_PLAPI, "ClientPutInServer called: pEntity=%d, playername=%s", pEntity ? m_Engine->IndexOfEdict(pEntity) : 0, playername);
RETURN_META(MRES_IGNORED);
}
 
 
void SamplePlugin::ShowMOTD(const char* lpcMsg, const char* lpcTitle, int iType, const char* lpcCmd, edict_t *pEntity){
KeyValues* kv = new KeyValues("data");

kv->SetString("title", lpcTitle); // info panel title
if ( iType == 1 )
{
kv->SetString("type", "1"); // show userdata from stringtable entry 
}
else if ( iType == 2 )
{
kv->SetString("type", "2"); // show userdata from stringtable entry 
}
else if ( iType == 3 )
{
kv->SetString("type", "4"); // show userdata from stringtable entry 
}
else if ( iType == 4 )
{
kv->SetString("type", "4"); // show userdata from stringtable entry 
}
// TYPE_TEXT = 0, // just display this plain text
// TYPE_INDEX, // lookup text & title in stringtable
// TYPE_URL, // show this URL
// TYPE_FILE, 
kv->SetString("msg", lpcMsg); // use this stringtable entry
if(lpcCmd && *lpcCmd)
kv->SetString("cmd", lpcCmd);// exec this command if panel closed
ShowViewPortPanel(pEntity, "info", true, kv);
kv->deleteThis();
}
 
 
void SamplePlugin::ShowViewPortPanel(edict_t* pEdict, const char* name, bool bShow, KeyValues* data){
int count = 0;
KeyValues *subkey = NULL;
if(data){
subkey = data->GetFirstSubKey();

while(subkey){
count++;

subkey = subkey->GetNextKey();
}
subkey = data->GetFirstSubKey(); // reset 
}
MRecipientFilter filter;
filter.AddRecipient(m_Engine->IndexOfEdict(pEdict));
bf_write *pBuffer = m_Engine->UserMessageBegin( &filter, 10 );

pBuffer->WriteString(name); 
pBuffer->WriteByte(bShow ? 1 : 0); 
pBuffer->WriteByte(count);
while(subkey){
pBuffer->WriteString(subkey->GetName());
pBuffer->WriteString(subkey->GetString());

subkey = subkey->GetNextKey();
}
m_Engine->MessageEnd();
}

[sslice]

The VGUIMenu user message no longer has an index of 10. In fact, I don't even know what the index of it is. The best way to use it is determine the index at runtime if you don't want your plugin to break in future engine updates.

Basically, you use IServerGameDLL::GetUserMessageInfo() to loop through all user messages until you find the one you need.

	int GetUserMessageIndex(const char *pszName)
	{
		char name [128];
		int size = 0;

		for (int x = 1; x != 22; ++x)
		{
			serverdll->GetUserMessageInfo(x, name, 128, size);
			if (size && strcmp(pszName, name) == 0)
			{
				return x;
			}
		}

		return 0;
	}

Now, instead of calling this everytime ShowViewPortPanel() is called, you would find the index when the plugin loads and store it in a global variable since it will not change while the server is running.

In this case, you would do something like:

g_vguiMenuIndex = GetUserMessageIndex("VGUIMenu");

I'm not sure how you'll end up getting data from this, though... sure you could have a form but how would you receive that data?