As for accents I think you would need to pick a different keyboard layout. You might also be able to use the Alt+0xxx (on numpad) combinations if you know the ASCII codes of the accented characters.
Unicode is not supported by Outpost 2, so you can't use characters that aren't in the Latin charset.
As for making the chat bar bigger, I don't think that's very feasible for a couple reasons:
- The game uses fixed length buffers for the chat text. I think the total length of the buffer is <64 characters (that's including the player's name tacked on i.e. "PlayerName: text") so increasing the size of the buffers wouldn't be that feasible.
There are other limits as well, for example the buffer sizes in the lists (like the chat log)
- The status bar itself wouldn't be able to display the entire string on a low resolution. On 640x480 or 800x600 the text could be cut off. (Keep in mind that Outpost 2 was originally designed to be run in 640x480x8bpp in fullscreen mode. The reason we can run it at higher resolutions is due to the fact that it will not switch to DirectDraw mode when the screen bit depth is 16bpp. One of the first patches we made on the game prevents it from switching to DirectDraw mode under any bit depth; this way you can maximize it to use your full screen resolution instead of being artificially reduced to 640x480 {the game does have problems with very high screen resolutions; for example I think when you start going above 2048 pixels wide unpredictable problems can happen}).
