test content
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc

Chat System Revamp

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
This is a proposal for a revamp of the chat system to both improve the general usage of the chat in STO and also help to aide those interested in Role Play. Some of the proposals here are incredibly minor, some are a little more involved.

I'll try to go through it in a way that best makes sense.

To simplify the explenations, assume that all examples are via the /local channel.

Change 1 - Replacing the colon.

Right now, standard chat and emotive text is far too difficult to discern with the only actual difference beeing a colon appearing after the player's name in standard speach. Here is an example of a normal chat and normal emote, see how difficult it is to discern the difference at a glance.

Bob@bobs_account: Hello there!
Bob@bobs_account Hello there!

This becomes even more difficul in a fast-moving channel and is, therefore, the first (and eaiest) of the changes I am proposing;

The colon needs to be replaced with the word "says" and the actual text itself needs to be incased in quotation marks. Additionaly, in the actual speach would appear a different colour. This difference in colour can be handled in several ways; either the player gets to pick both colours for every channel, or the text colour automaticaly chosen as a lighter shade of the channel colour, or the text itself defaults to white in the /local channel but retains the channel colour elsewhere.

Here is the above example but with the changes. Note that in this instance I have set the /local channel's colour to green:

Bob@bobs_account says "Hello there!"
Bob@bobs_account Hello there!

Clearly you can already see quite a marked difference between an emote and standard text. Its very easy to discern at a glance, and just as easy in fast flowing chat.

Change 2 - Improving the /me command formatting

With the change to the formatting of text and emotive text in place, the /me command can now have additional functionality to improve the way players can write their own emote on the fly.

As you noticed from above, the entire emotive text was green (green was the /local channel colour). However, if the player incases text in quotation marks, the /me command is now smart enough to realise it needs to format colours.

So, an example of emotive text with additional formatting might be this:

/me laughs heavily "you fool!" shakes his head

Which then appear in chat as:

Bob@bobs_account laughs heavily "you fool!" shakes his head!

You can see that the command was smart enough to change the font colour of the text between the two quotation marks. However, if the player forgets to add the second quatation, the command would add the quation for the player at the end of the entire command string, so in the above example everything from the word 'you' would appear white.

Change 3 - Adding an animation preset to the /me command

The /me command would have an additional and optional preset that a player can add into the emotive. Simply by adding the name of an existing emote incased in square brackets would fire off the animation associated with that emote but would not include the normal emotive text string (i.e. it would be like the /emote_notext command).

For example, if you wanted your character to do the wave animation, you might write the command something like this:

/me [wave] waves frantically

Which would display your custom emote precisely as above, but your character would also perform the wave animation. If the chat system is unable to match the bracketed name with an existing emote, it is simply ignored and removed from the text string.

Change 4 - Adding Moods

Now that our normal non-emotive text has the addition of the word "says" we can manipulate it to include character moods.

Moods determine what word appears before, and in some cases after, your text. The "normal" and default mood would simply display text as exampled above.

There would be two ways to use and set moods. Using the /mood command without additional text would set the chosen mood to your default mood - therefore everytime you enter normal non-emotive text, the chat system would use this new mood. An example of setting your default mood might be:

/mood angry
/say I am really angry!

You can also set the mood for a single string of text by including the text with the command. This litteraly just uses the mood for that one string of text and does not change the default. An example of this would be:

/mood angry I am really angry!

Both of the above would appear as something like this:

Bob@bobs_account says angrily "I am really angry!"

Change 5 - Ability to edit emotive text for fixed emotes

The player would be given the change to edit the text string that is displayed everytime any of the static emotes are fired. Although the default emotive text would remain hard coded and un-changable, the player would be able to set an alternative string of text which the chat client uses instead of the default where present.

To example this, the command /emote dabo activates a "dabo" animation and prints to the /local channel the string "Dabo!". Therefore via the emote editor, the player could replace 'Dabo! with the string "I just got a Dabo!" so whenever the player then types /emote dabo the client uses the player's custom emotive text rather than the default. The custom text can then be easily removed which reverts it back to the default.

And example of this might be:

/emote Dabo "I just got Dabo!"

Change 6 - Bringing it all Together

The final change brings some of the above features together via a custom emote and custom mood feature. From this feature, the player can add their own moods and emotes as detailed below;

Custom Mood Required Fields:
Mood Name - Required - this name is used when activating the /mood command. I.E. if you set the name to "blah" then you activate the custom mood with the command /mood blah, or with an accompaning string of text, /mood blah I feel aweful. The name cannot conflict with existing names.
Prefix - Required - the string of text that appears between the character's name and the printed text, such as 'says dejectidly'
Appendix - Optional - An optional string of text that appears at the end of the printed text

Custom Emote Fields:
Emote Name - Required - the name used to activate the emote, i.e. /emote blah. The name cannot conflict with existing emote names.
Emotive Text - Required - a string of text that is printed as an emote, such as "emits a sigh"
Animation - Required - a selection of animations that your character will perform when the emote is activated.

In any of the above text fields (except for names) there are few additional commands that can be used to aide in formating. These are:

&gp - displays either "his" or "her" depending on the character's gender
&g - displays either "he" or "she" depending on the character's gender

Additional Features

Clickable Links
Make hyperlinks clickable.

Custom Examine Window
Allow the user to create a custom "examine" window - by "examin window" I mean the box that appears with you click a linked item. Therefore this would work precisely the same as linking an item, except that the player gets to chose the text that appears in the box. This would work as follows:

/say hello, read my [box]PADD, Some text here[/box]

Which would print the following to chat:

Bob@Bobs_account says "hello, read my [PADD]"

The word "[PADD]" in the printed text would then be clickable which opens a small box with the words "Some text here" displayed in it.

This would allow for Fleets to advertise Fleet info without having to spam lots of lines of text.

Increase Word Count
Increase the limit of the word count. It is currently far too short.


If there is anything here you think you can improve upon, or something you think I've missed, please post it and I will update this thread with your suggestions as well.
Post edited by Unknown User on

Comments

  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2010
    Sounds great! I fully support this, especially replacing the colon.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2010
    I want a Star Wars Galaxy chat and emotion system.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2010
    Raso wrote:
    I want a Star Wars Galaxy chat and emotion system.

    Well that is essentialy what these proposals would introduce and perhaps maybe even a more little advanced that SWG's.

    I'm also going to update the first post with a couple extra things I missed.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2010
    I would like to see those changes too!
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2010
    these are ingenious ideas i would love to see them implemented in game.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2010
    Thanks :)

    If you can think of anything else, let me know
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2010
    I'm all for ideas to improve RP in the game! Great job coming up with this!

    When I first read Change 1 thought, why bother - this really is insignificant. It wasn't until I saw how your were manipulating it later with moods that the light bulb clicked on.

    But, overall, I'm not a fan of the "mood". To often I seen folks that forget they've used it and you get things like "bob says angrily "too funny!" You also end up limited to the moods someone has put into a list. I'm perfectly okay with the extra typing, e.g., /me says playfully, "Need any help?" =>bob says playfully, "Need any help?"

    I wasn't to sure about the use of an alternative color for the text in the quotes, but compare these:
    bob says playfully, "Need any help?"
    bob says playfully, "Need any help?"
    and the difference literally jumps out at you - so great idea!


    I'm all for Change 2 & 3! I've see others (like Darren Kiltor) also recommend embedding emoti-animation [e.g., /wave] in the emotes. I also like the idea of adding additional macro expansions (&rank to get you target's rank, &gender to get your target's gender, &race, &faction etc.)

    Change 5 - Ability to edit emotive text for fixed emotes
    You didn't provide an example, how about:
    /emote Dabo "I just got Dabo!"

    Additional Features
    I really didn't see the need for clickable links for RP. I suspect you've included this so that immersion breaking chatter (je.g., "join my fleet (see info here)" is less intrusive for the rest of us. Good idea, but non-RPers aren't too likely to go out of their way for us. :D
    Unless if can be tied specifically to an RP usage I'd suggest dropping it. Trying to otherwise force behavior on the community won't endear us to them.

    Increase Word Count
    I definitely agree with this one. But, we also don't want it too large.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2010
    I added the clickable links not specificaly to help in RP but just because its a chat functionality that is generaly useful, so I'm going to keep it there :P

    This isn't just about improving the chat for RP, though RP is clearly the primary focus, its also about general improvements.

    I'm all for giving the player as much choice as possible, so thats why personaly I would prefer the option to set the colour of actual text independantly from the colour of the channel - so for example setting the /local colour to green and the local text to white to get the effect I posted above. For those that want it the same colour, they can obviously do that too - hence the choice ;)

    Some people find moods useful, others don't. But if you have a mood editor as I described above it means you can use it to save your own most used mood and emotes, so you aren't just restricted to a list that Cryptic have come up with - and in fact with the editor in place Cryptic don't have to make any at all, they can leave it entirely to the player.

    I know for me personally there are several common emotes and moods that I use. Things like "says angrily" and "smirks" - so it speeds up my response time if I am able to have those stored in a custom made mood or emote.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2010
    This isn't just about improving the chat for RP, though RP is clearly the primary focus, its also about general improvements.

    I agree :) This needs to be done.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2010
    This is a terrific idea!
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2010
    If only a dev would actually read it :/
Sign In or Register to comment.