Chat / Speech Bubble Commands

By default City of heroes chat/speech bubbles are Black text with a black border on a white background. You can customize this to better suit your character or match your Super Group colors.

There is 5 main commands that make up the chat/speech bubble:

bgcolor= The bubble's back ground color.
color = The text/word color.
border = The color of the bubble's border.
duration = Length of time in seconds bubble is displayed.
scale = The size of the text in the bubble

The easiest way to automatically generate new colors for your chat/speech bubble is to update the bind command for the "enter" key, as the enter key is mainly used to start your text string, this is a good place to begin. Start by typing the following into the command line as it is displayed below:

/bind enter beginchat <color ****><bgcolor ****><border ****><duration *>

replace the **** with a color of your choice from the Hex color chart and replace * with a digit in seconds you wish it to be displayed for. You can use the name of the color or the code, but the code is preferable as you can use additional commands with the hex codes that wont work with the color name.

If i wanted to make my speech bubbles have a red border, white text on a blue background and be displayed for 10 seconds i would use the following: Note: there is no spaces between the >< commands.

/bind enter beginchat <color #FFFFFF><bgcolor #0000FF><border #FF0000><duration 10>

If i wanted to make the bubble slightly transparent i can add in an additional value in as a percentage, 0% being totally transparent and 100% not transparent at all. This will allow you to see the scenery behind the speech bubble. Lets make the background 50% transparent by using the following command:

/bind enter beginchat <color #FFFFFF><bgcolor #0000FF50><border #FF0000><duration 10>

notice the extra 50 i placed after the color command, this tells city of heroes interface to make the blue background 50% transparent. Very cool effect :)

You can also change the size of the text in the bubble, great for those of you running CoH is super high resolutions. The scale command is employed here with values of 0 to 4, 1 being default. Go larger fonts with a value of 4 or smaller with a value of 0.5. You can insert the scale command onto the end of the command line we have so far, like this:

/bind enter beginchat <color #FFFFFF><bgcolor #0000FF50><border #FF0000><duration 10><scale 2>

Now you have bound the new chat/speech bubble commands successfully every time you hit ENTER to say something the command we have bound to the enter key will pop up, now type your text that you want to say and press enter again to say it. If all goes well your bubble will have a new color scheme.

If you wish to have multiple color scheme's you can set up more bind commands for different color sets, just replace the word ENTER with a key that is not in use, like this:

/bind q beginchat <color #FFFFFF><bgcolor #0000FF50><border #FF0000><duration 10><scale 2>