- Will we be able to make and keep friends lists using the in-game menu options?
Yes, the global friends list is functional and is mapped to your roster. That means if you connect to your account from a standard XMPP client like Pidgin, all of your friends will show up in your Buddy List, and vice versa.
- Similarly - how about creating and joining channels?
Yes, you can create/join global channels. They are implemented as MUC chatrooms, which can be joined from standard clients as well as in game.
Currently the ability to set channel options like private or moderated does not yet function from in-game. However, you can create a chatroom with those options set from a standard XMPP client and then join it from COH.
If we add tabs or channels to the chat box, will it remember them the next time we log in?
Not yet, but option, UI, and channel saving is something I'm hoping to have working by release. No promises though.
Would the in-game search option work on some level? To show you who is on?
Currently no. A /whoall command to see who is in the current zone is on the to-do list, however XMPP in general doesn't have a way to query everyone on the entire server.
There is one global channel that new characters are joined to by default to act as a gathering point, however it only does this once so you can leave the channel if you don't want to be part of it.
- Related to the above - would the "Hide" options work?
Not really, though since there's no global search you can hide somewhere obscure and only your friends will be able to easily find you. You also have the option to type /xmppdisconnect to wander around an icon-esque empty city.
I don't know how XMPP operates - at all - but based on the context of comments above, it seems like people can split off into their own private channels/hosted rooms/servers. Would they show up in a search from the main Titan XMPP server? If they did, would they show up as being on a different "server"? (Like "such and such person's character is on Virtue server and you're currently on Pinnacle from the original live game) Or would they not show up at all?
The Titan server will have s2s (server-to-server) XMPP communication disabled until we're confident that we have the ability to deal with issues like spam and harassment if they originate from other servers.
Currently the only way to communicate with someone on another server is to know their full JID, which looks like an email address. You can add them to your friends list and they get assigned a shorter 'global handle' that you can refer to them more easily with.
- Would emotes work with the regular commands?
Yes, thanks in no small part to the
effort on the Icon forum from back in 2013 where several community members (wyldhunt in particular) helped compile a spreadsheet mapping the common names for emotes to the sequencer state bits that cause the animation.
- Can Masterminds spawn non-combat versions of their pets? And if so - would the mastermind/pet emote options work?
No, that would require AI (even if all it did was follow) and pathfinding, which are probably the two most complex things that the COH server did and the hardest to reproduce.
- Come to think of it - would people be able to spawn NPCs and make emote commands work for THEM? (Would be great for people wanting to "tabletop" RP and say - "this is your opponent" etc.)
Not yet, but there are some plans to do something along those lines in the future.
