With some of the advances, I was wondering if we could rethink this. Using the mouse driven menu system, could you not set up some sort of click-to-type chat system by just concatenating strings? I know this would be primitive, but even pre-decided team-based commands in a menu (like alot of hl based mods have) would be cool. As it is, I've only seen cogs that use hotkeys, which is cool until I forget which key I want. Any ideas besides these? How advanced is key-capturing?

Preconfigured messages via a menu would be a snap. Clicking a menu to type text out manually would be tedious, but possible.

As for keytrapping, it depends on the keys you want to capture. The WASD fasion keys are just a matter of GetThingThrust(), crouch IsThingCrouching(), but Jump is a little trickier. SaberMaster whipped up a keytrapping cog and it's pretty good. Nab it under the cog section here: http://www.geocities.com/sabersdomain/index.html

in JKRPG was a team chat function, if a player of team x activates thing x send message .... to teammembers of team x.