Forums! The Musical

As you've probably already noticed, I made some changes to chat yesterday, which included the addition of a toolbar for some of the less-obvious functions, along with a few layout and style changes. On the whole, I think these look pretty good, and there are further changes coming which will enhance the system further, including coloured channel names, a tabbed display option, macros etc.

One issue that has come up, however, and with which I totally agree, is that, while popup chat is fine, adding more stuff to the inline chat effectively reduces either the amount of space for actual chatting, or requires making the chat pane bigger, reducing the amount of space for adventuring.

Up until now, I've been developing popup and inline chat simultaneously, and all features of one are going into the other, but I don't think that's workable.

What I am currently considering is removing a bunch of stuff from the inline chat, restoring it to a pretty basic system that includes only a chat display pane, a message box and a send button. In other words, the toolbar AND the list of people in chat would be removed, and instead these features would be available only in the popup chat.

As an alternative, I could make it so that the display of the toolbar and person list would be an option that could be turned on and off based on user preference. This requires a significantly larger amount of work than simply removing this stuff, so I need to know whether or not it's worth doing. Which is where your input comes in.

I'd really like to know what players think about this issue in particular, but feel free to make any other suggestions regarding chat while you're at it (although note the things I've already said are in the pipeline earlier in this post).

Cheers,
Gobb

I personally would love to see the inline chat go back to what it was before you put in the toolbar...i like it, but like whoever it was pointed out...gotta make chat bigger to compensate for the loss of the chat screen size....so I would like to see at the very least keeping the people in chat option either always on for inline or at least an option to turn on...i've started to use pop out chat here and there, but definetly am used to the inline vs pop out.

Though i might be more inclines to use pop out chat if it were to do something when there was a new msg or something...not sure if that's even possible, but yeah.

Mas

With regard to the person list in inline chat, I'm happy to make that an option if people want it, but I wonder just how useful it'll be, once there are more users. Say, 50 or 100, or 200 in chat at any one time. My guess - not very.

Re having popup chat do something when there's a new message... I'm looking into that. Theoretically it would be nice if the taskbar button would flash like other apps, but I'm not sure if web browsers would support that. Doesn't look like it, but maybe.

It seems to me that TOG gets by just fine without having a list of everyone who's in chat...*shrug* Not that that's a good excuse to sway opinion one way or another; just an observation.

maybe down the road we get rid of it then, because it would prove to be more of a hassle than a help...but right now i kinda like it...and if i were not a red shirt...knowing who the red shirts are as a green shirt would/could prove to be useful down the line...again realitive short term, because again once the player base grows, then would be more difficult...i guess with my first post it was in the here and now...not looking to the ["distant"] future.

That raises another question: If we decide to eliminate the online player list from the in-line chat panel, should we consider perhaps at least having a list of online moderators?

In the interest of conservation of space, my vote is to keep the in-line chat as close to ToG's chat as possible. Feature-sparse and designed to simply keep you up to date on what's being said. (Keeping right-click functionality)

Popup chat would have all the cool extras, like the constant list of who's in chat.

To address Wolf's latest query, if we eliminate the list of in-chat players from the in-line chat perhaps an '@' or '(M)' next to mod's names when doing a /whois could be implemented as an easy way for someone to identify who the current mods in channel are.

Grokly pretty much just said exactly what I'm thinking. So there's no point repeating it

With regard to identifying mods, using @ is consistent with IRC "Operator" identification (and with Stacy's chat monitor in STC), and could appear not just in a /who but whenever a mod says something, for example:

<lobby> @Gobberwart: Something incredibly interesting and/or funny as usual.
<lobby> NotAMod: Wow Gobb, you're so incredibly interesting and/or funny. As usual.

/who output would appear as:

*Players in channel lobby: @Gobberwart, @Grokly, ANonModerator, SomeOtherNonModerator, YetAnotherNonModerator

I'm also thinking that the /who output (and the userlist in popup chat) should be rearranged so that Moderators appear first (sorted by name), followed by non-Moderators. Pretty much as shown in the example above.

DrWolf wrote:It seems to me that TOG gets by just fine without having a list of everyone who's in chat..

Some historical info: In my opinion, the inability to quickly and easily identify who's in chat at any given time, without having to use a special command to do so, is a major failing of ToG's chat. I loathed (no pun intended) it the first time I saw it, and created the STC Chat /who greasemonkey script as a workaround. Unfortunately, it wasn't compatible with CDMoyer's tabbed chat script, and didn't work with other channels, so it wasn't massively useful and I lost interest in making it better, but on the whole I find it a really handy feature and something I'd like to retain, at least in popup chat.

The same thing applies to the "USER has joined chat" and "USER has left chat" messages. Coming from an IRC background, I'm used to them and find them useful. Because I like to know who's coming and going at any given time. Some people find that annoying more than useful, which is why there is an option to turn it off, but I'm sure there are at least some people who find it useful. Somewhere.

Anyway, that's just some background as to why those features exist. In case anyone's interested.

Gobb I had a similar idea to the mods and non mods people, it can be done that mods/admins have a different color in chat than the other members?

unknownZ wrote:Gobb I had a similar idea to the mods and non mods people, it can be done that mods/admins have a different color in chat than the other members?

Indeed. There is a plan somewhere to let players customise the colours that different groups of players (mods, players, friends etc.) are shown in, but it would be possible in the short term to simply show mods in red and non-mods in green (or black), probably in combination with the '@' (as mentioned above) for those who prefer a less colourful layout.

unknownZ wrote:Gobb I had a similar idea to the mods and non mods people, it can be done that mods/admins have a different color in chat than the other members?

Not sure I like this idea. Mods should be able to converse just like other players unless they are issuing a warning or a ban. In which case it will certainly be a different color.
And if you are in popup chat, they are also identified by the color of their shirts.

I don't have a problem with players being able to customize player groups with their own colors, but I'm not for forcing it on all.

In regards to what I previously said about TOG getting by just fine without an online player list, it's also noteworthy that TOG doesn't have the option for a floating chat pane. Any references I make to TOG should be understood to refer only to inline chat, and not include the floating pane.
Anyway, I agree with Grokly about "not forcing it on all", but that the players should be able to change the color that the mods names show up in. And as a side-note, might I recommend that red not be one of the possible colors for names to be changed to? That could get confusing. I mean, I'm sure someone has already thought of that particular detail...but just in case someone hasn't, there it is.

I haven't read all the above posts so sorry if i'm repeating but in my opinion I think the optional toolbar and list of people for in-line chat is the best way to go, for me I personally wouldn't want the tool bar but I would want the people list.

OK, at this stage, I've removed the toolbar from inline chat (it was just too big), but I'm still debating the user list thing. Honestly, with more than a few people in there, I can't see it being very useful since it's only a few lines high (depending on how you size the pane), and it seems sensible to just remove it from there entirely.

Note that the commands that WERE in the toolbar have text equivalents - /exit /clear (or /cls) and /restart, so you can still use those commands without the buttons.

And the /who command works in the current channel now, instead of saying "look over there".

Any more thoughts?

Yes, make steve optional in inline chat if you have to because I would personally prefer to keep him

(for those who don't know steve = user list)

One thing I noticed in chat is that the chat notifies us whenever anyone logs in/out. I know it's not much of a problem right now, since there are rarely more than 6 people in chat, but soon, it might become a bit of an issue. Yes, we can choose to have these notifications disabled, but then what about people we WANT to see sign in/out? (i.e. friends)

What do you think?

That to me sounds like a suggestion for a friend system reenix...more implementing...yay!

Sorry guys, but yeah, that's what it was, sort of. ^_^

There needs to be a chat effect that adds a U after every O you type in chat. That wouuld be cououl.

Failed embedded commands should be more descriptive. Getting "*Usage: /roll xdy" just really doesn't help much.

Interesting. "*Usage: /roll xdy" would be perfectly satisfactory for me, but then... I'm a programmer and I'm used to it.

What would you suggest instead?

Perhaps maybe a summary of what the wiki say's about the command?

"*Usage: /roll [number of dice]d[sides per dice] Example: /roll 2d20 is 2 20-sided dice. And where's the Mountain Dew?"

I'm a DOS user (and a geek, to boot) and I'm used to that.

The square brackets are used within DOS to indicate an optional argument, which neither of these are. I could also go on a rant about how DOS frequently fails to give any more information than "The syntax of the command is incorrect", but that's beside the point and Microsoft's failings aren't an excuse for me to be lazy.

How's this:

*No number of dice or sides supplied.
Usage: /roll XdY [public]
Where: X is the number of dice and Y is the number of sides on each die.
Include the keyword public to show results to everyone in the channel.

I like that. I think that's better than "Unknown command"

It's definitely more descriptive and fulfills my request, but I feel it's too long. If there is a way it could all be condensed down to just one line for us users with low attention spans, that would be even better.

I totally agree it's too long, but I can't think of a way to do it in a single line that (a) includes all necessary information and (b) isn't messy. If you can, please post it up here and I'll include it, otherwise I'm going to go with the "long but complete and clear" version.

Gobberwart wrote:What I am currently considering is removing a bunch of stuff from the inline chat, restoring it to a pretty basic system that includes only a chat display pane, a message box and a send button. In other words, the toolbar AND the list of people in chat would be removed, and instead these features would be available only in the popup chat.

As an alternative, I could make it so that the display of the toolbar and person list would be an option that could be turned on and off based on user preference. This requires a significantly larger amount of work than simply removing this stuff, so I need to know whether or not it's worth doing. Which is where your input comes in.

Cheers,
Gobb

Is this on the list for get done by beta? I was recently thinking about it and decided to ask. Thanks.

Personally, I don't believe I have ever needed or even used the toolbar. But the player list? What would be the benefit of removing it? I find it way too useful and informative to get rid of it. Also, I use the inline chat rather than the popup; I tried the popup once, but I found myself just resizing the Paradox window to fit the chat window underneath it so I didn't have to alt-tab or taskbar-click between the two.

In inline chat, with fifty-plus people in chat, what would the benefit be of *having* the player list? Hence why I was considering removing it and just making inline chat very basic.

Personally, I almost exclusively use popup chat, but that's because I don't actually play the game, at least not in production, so I just have chat open at the side of stuff I'm actually working on. That's probably just me though.

Is it on the list? Yes. For beta? Depends... It's not on the critical list, that's for sure.

I also hate popup, don't remove the player information.

I was more or less wanting the player list as an option in both chats. You almost never get a message so long that the message wraps even in inline chat, so it really isn't an issue, but lets say I am using the pop-out chat and I want it to be small-widthed and readable, it is almost impossible to have it 1-2 inches wide and readable. So I'm in favor of the option. As we were talking about in chat a few times the other day, it seems about half the game uses inline and half uses pop-out. Yeah, remove the bar from inline, make the chat list an option. preferred route.

I like the idea of having a greek system instead of calling them "clans".
How about if each "house" had a fridge you could raid once per day. You could get one food and one drink item each time.

Wrong post, man

Oops!