I started to try out the scripting abilities of AO a bit and found some things that hinder the development of more dynamic scripts.

1) There is a reminder saying that the application will loose focus when you launch an external application from within a script and AO is running in full screen mode. However you might wish to invoke external applications that have no output at all to generate dynamic script content (I used Windows Scripting Host to display the local Time in the active channel). It would be good to have the reminder disabled by some option setting.

2) External commands are not handles synchronously. It should be at least possible to make a script halt until an external application finished. The same option should be possible for all internal scripting commands to prevent from having to test out timings using delay commands.

3) It should be possible to reroute the output of console applications into AO. Like this scripting would be as easy as writing CGI scripts.

4) There should be lots more variables for virtual everything, e.g. HP, EXP, Money, ...

These are just some ideas i`m having of how to make scripting for AO more effective. Most of them should be quite easy to implement.

-Schommi/Metal Dawn