It would be very handy if there could be an addition to the addjournalentry syntax, to optionally allow the added text to also be displayed on the players screen and thus logged to the UO journal. A journal entry could then (optionally) also serve as a notification of a quest checkpoint that was reached.
yes, I had been thinking of that as well as the option to autolog npc xmldialog text.
For echoing I will probably just add the 'echoaddjournalentry' that will both echo and add the text.
Another possibility is to have a 'notifyaddjournalentry' that adds the text and then echos something like
A new entry 'EntryIDstring' has been added to the journal for 'questname'
and doesnt actually echo the full journal text itself.
For xmldialogs it would involve adding an option to individual dialog entries for journal logging of the dialog text to a specified questholder.
I think all of those are all excellent ideas. More flexibility is always nice, and I can see using them all when designing quests.
The new questholder journal entries make it much easier to provide information that can be referred to during the time it takes to complete a long or complicated quest. But adding support for various forms of UO journal logging will help minimize redundancy for both the questholder and xmldialog entries.
you can check out some of the new journal features in the beta 3.22 update.