Update: The Emoji Chat Suite has been updated to v1.5.2 which includes customization settings and is no longer a fork of the default Roblox chat, but rather an add-on as it should be. Minor bugs are also fixed.
The Emoji Chat Suite is an add-on to the default Roblox chat. It allows users the ability to type denotations for emojis or select from a list of emojis which can be toggled by the button on the far-right of the chat bar. This is extremely useful for PC players who do not have emojis readily available as a part of their keyboard. I have spent the past 3 days working on this for Flight! but have decided that itād be useful in a lot more games than just one. So please feel free to take it for yourself and implement it into your games. This feature is pretty useful and helps make the Roblox chat easier to use for everyone so I would love to see more people using this.
Sample place: https://www.roblox.com/games/1842945171/Emoji-Chat-Suite-Sample-Place
How it works:
The Emoji Chat Suite works similarly to how emojis work in Discord. The user can either click the emoji list toggle to view a list of all available emojis and click them to use them in the chat, or they can type the denotations in the chatbar themselves. For example, you can either type ":thinking:"
or click the emoji which is in the emoji list. The emoji list is organized in the same fashion the one in Discord is and for the most part uses the same denotations. The one difference is some of the more popular emojis are put near the top of the list. You can organize this in any fashion by editing the EmojiList modules. Additionally, you can add or remove denotations for emojis, the only rule is that no two denotations can be identical(which should be expected).
If the emoji list is visible, the chat wonāt fade away. Additionally, the Emoji list becomes hidden if the user clicks on the emoji list button again, clicks the chat bar to start typing, or clicks anywhere else on the screen. The emoji list is automatically sized to the size of the chat ui at the start of the play session so it scales correctly on all platforms.
Here you can see the button at the far-end of the chat bar which allows users to view a list of emojis that they can use. The textbox that users can chat in has been shortened slightly so that their messages are not hidden behind the emoji list button.
Here is what the Emoji list looks like. The button to toggle it fades from black and white into color on hover and back again when you stop hovering over it or the emoji list disappears.
Here is a gif of the Emoji Chat Suite in-action in case you wanted to see how it functioned before you tried it out in your game.
This is only the first version of this chat add-on, I hope people find this useful for platforms that donāt have emoji keyboards. Iām not entirely sure of the mobile or gamepad support, so I will make sure to work on that and update this thread at that time. Additionally, Iām planning on adding tab buttons to the bottom, such as āpeopleā, āanimalsā, etc. which will make the emoji list automatically scroll to the desired set of emojis in the list. Iām also planning on adding IntelliSense so that if a user types in ā:heaā it will automatically show a couple of suggested heart emojis. Let me know what you think, Iād love to get feedback on this and know if my work was worthwhile.