I have been thinking about this a bit more and I think I know of a way to make it work smoothly with the minimal amount of work. Here is what I am thinking:
1. Add a new table named "saylinks" that has 2 fields: ID and Phrase. The ID field would just be an auto-incrementing ID number. The Phrase field would be a the string for the actual phrase we are wanting to create a link fro.
2. Add an in-game command that will allow admins to add a phrase to the new saylink table. This command would be called something like #addsaylink <message> and it would just add the new message and assign it to the auto-incremented ID. This way, an admin can go through their quest prompts from in game and add the links as they see them. This is optional, but I think it would be a nice feature to help simplify the process. Of course, people could simple update the table manually if they preferred.
3. Create a new quest command that would generate the hash of the item link directly into a script text message. For example:
Code:
quest::say("This is a quest::saylink(link) example.");
And that line would show this when the NPC says it:
Code:
Soanso says,'This is a link example'
This may be one of the hardest parts, because I am not sure how to have it convert the quest command directly into the hash when it is inside of a string like that. I am pretty sure that quest::ChooseRandom() works inside of a string like that, so I may have to do some looking into how it works for that command. Otherwise, we would have to do something like this instead:
Code:
my $link = quest::saylink(link);
quest::say("This is a $link example.");
Which should be easy enough to do, but for scripting purposes, it would make things much quicker and simpler to do it the first way inside the actual string.
4. The quest::saylink() command would be set to query the saylink table in the database. Since the ID numbers would start at 1 and go up from there, the saylink quest function would then simple add 1 million to that number to create the item_id number for the hash. So, if the table had the first phrase as ID 1, that would be converted to 1000001 as the ID number. Then, the Handle_OP_ItemLinkClick would just be set to look for any item_id over 1 million and handle any that are as a say link.
5. Once the Handle_OP_ItemLinkClick finds a hash that needs to be treated as a say link, it will just do a simple database query in the saylink table for the phrase that matches that item ID. Since the item ID had 1 million added to it, it would need to subtract 1 million before doing the query. Then, it would simply parse it like it does in the code I first submitted here.
I think the hard parts are going to be getting the quest command to output an item link from directly within a string, and also to get the queries working perfectly. I am not much of a query guru, so I may need help to make sure the query is set properly. Basically it would just be querying the string that would be the hard part. We would need to make sure that it finds the exact match, and not just a partial or one that just contains the string.
The saylink table would be set to use the phrase as the key, so there wouldn't be multiple entries for the same phrase. There isn't any need to have more than 1 entry for the same string anyway.
Last, there would just need to be a few error messages set in place to report if something is missing. Like, if you try to use quest::saylink() without actually having that string in the saylink table. It could have the NPC give some warning about needing to update the database.
I don't know how many admins would use a system like this. I just think it would be something interesting and new. I have a feeling that once people actually see it working, it will grow on them quickly.