Flawless Chat Inferface - Complete Concept

[Havena]

The chat interface will make more difference to the natural feel and enjoyment of the game than any other GUI aspect. It is for human language ? your interaction with the living souls in the virtual world. When I briefly played the-game-that-will-not-be-named, the chat interface was enough to make it unplayable for me. It is very important.


The following is a carefully thought-out chat interface concept:

Application:
One issue is that you want to be able to start typing instantly. As an example, right now in PS switching out of mouselook and then clicking the chat window and then typing is inefficient. There should be one hotkey to press and you can start typing your communication. The hotkey should toggle between the GUI?s two main modes; Movement and Interaction. With Movement Mode you can move around and fight with hotkeys, controls keys, mouse or anything you like, until you press the one hotkey to toggle into Interaction Mode. Interaction Mode will bring up your mouse cursor and allow you to click around your GUI and environment to do things. You could also use this mode occasionally in combat to quickly perform special actions. In Interaction mode, only the mouse is used to interact; any keypresses go straight into the chat panel so you can talk quickly and easily; that is until you press the one interface-toggle key (perhaps ESC?) which will bring you back to Movement Mode. This will also open up the possibility of things like assigning right-click for jump, as there will be less reserved keys/buttons.


Details:
The chat panel itself should consist of two main divisions; Local and Selectable.

The Local division should be one half of the chat panel which is stationary and communicates with people in your immediate vicinity. It should also be used for NPC interaction and important system feedback relevant to your current activity. It should have a toggle checkbox for allowing/disallowing display of ?/shout?ed messages in your current ?town?.

The Selectable division would be more complex. Of course it would take up the other half of the chat panel. You can click items in a list down the side of it to choose the category of communication which it will display and send. Default list items would include System Messages, World-Wide chat (probably full of spam and avoided by experienced players), Buddy List Chat (mutual buddies can communicate), Personal Messages (could be tidily avoided by famous players who get ?/tell? Personal Message Syndrome). Items in the category list would display a different colour if they contained unread messages. You should simply click the desired list item or click into the division?s prompt to use it.

You could then add a variety of your own rooms to the category list. An obvious one would be your Guild room. You could also enter any strangely named room like ?peaceful777? which only your best friends know about, so they can enter it too and you can talk without n00bs and PMS. Rooms like this will save famous players and their friends from resorting to ICQ or similar to escape PMS.

Whenever you toggle into Interaction Mode the cursor should start in the prompt of the division you were last using.

The interface should also support implementation of all the usual conveniences such as TAB autocomplete of names and commands, pressing up to repeat last sentence (with flood control), a clickable buddy list to ?/tell? players, etc.

As far as I know this system should be flawless. It would be a little extra work to implement, but it would address so many issues of current MMORPGs and would make the game so much more enjoyable for everyone, n00bs and pros alike.

havena@psxg.tk

[Skain]

I struggled to envision your idea for the chat interface so i quickly drew what i thought u meant, how close is this

[Havena]

Yes like that but more like this:



Thanks! A picture was a great Idea :] .


Ofcourse appearance and size is a whole other issue. Also whether/how it displays in Movement Mode.

Perhaps when in Movement Mode just a minimal version of the Local pane could show at the bottom of the screen, with a little indicator that goes red when the lower pane has a new message.  It would only be a tap of a key to bring it up momentarily to check it.

Also I think a \'/whisper\' or \'/w\' command would be a necessity to address only one person inside #CloseM8s123 or #ExplorersGuild .

Maybe Buddies list item could be right-clicked to bring up your buddies list which could in turn be right-clicked on a certain buddy to auto/tell or whatever.

[Kuiper7986]

I love it, but it clogs the screen a bit too much, just a tad bit.

[Havena]

As I said, size is another issue, which it will be for any chat interface.

However it wouldn\'t matter so much if it was mostly hidden when you were moving and and fighting, only to appear in full size when you bring up the full interaction GUI.

[hook]

nothing against it, but i like the chat window as it is, plus i\'d rather not see any channels in the game

just KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) :] (not meant as an insult at all!!)

[Havena]

You\'d prefer no channels?

So what should famous players who constantly have their chat window flooded with personal messages do?

The alternative is to have all shouting, guild chat, buddy chat, talk around you and system messages all scrolling up in one window, which would be havoc to try to keep up with.

Hence the tendancy of famous players to deteriorate the atmosphere of their game by coupling it with ICQ/MSN.

And would server-wide chat all scroll up in your one window too? I hope not - the alternative is that you just lose the possibility of server wide chat and other things.

I know the description for design is complex, but all the details are in the name of keeping it intuitive and easy to use. I believe for the end user it would indeed be KISS  

[hook]

*hook/Seeln goes into a corner and is ashamed*
sorry, i didn\'t read the whole idea ...it was 3 am

yea, the idea\'s good, the switch-button\'s a must, the local (the same as /say now) window is also a must, and i like it. the shout on/off option is great!
also the /whisper and tab-autocompletition options are a must
the selectable window (i\'d like to call it telepathic to make it seem more \"real\"/integrated in the system, but ok...) is a great idea, but the \"channels\" should be controlled in different stages
1) every guild has its own \"chanel\" to which only the guild-members can access
2) the buddies and close friends systems would have to be remade, since for now we only have buddies (but it\'s a great idea!!) ...maybe a better idea (maybe as an option in it) would be to have buddies and close friends only open up a menu to which one you would like to /tell or /whisper, since not all of your buddies know each other, and you probably won\'t want to tell something to everyone of your close friends
3) other \"channels\" could be made only by the devs
4) there would have to be a history made for all these \"channels\"

about the chat windows while moving ...a really eyecandy idea would be that whole windows (including borders!) would get even more transparent so that you can just read it without straining your eyes, but just so much it doesn\'t bother at all while moving ...the personal messages like /tell /whisper or even guild messages would (maybe selectable which in the options) would be displayed normally  ...as they would be without the \"movement-transparency\", or at leat less transparent as the other messages
i\'d give this transparent-windows idea as a default on, but it could be turned off in the options (so you could have it as it is now, or as you said)

p.s. why do i talk about \"windows\" instad of parts as you do? well, i think that all of those three parts should be movable and resizable separatly (although as the default layout, i like your setting of the \"windows\")
p.p.s. channels are a good name for these \"channels\" IMO, especially if we\'re going to explain it as thelepathy

[Havena]

Thanks for the great contributions - all excellent thoughts. I like to consider server-reaching chat as telepathy too .

Originally posted by hook
2) the buddies and close friends systems would have to be remade, since for now we only have buddies (but it\'s a great idea!!) ...maybe a better idea (maybe as an option in it) would be to have buddies and close friends only open up a menu to which one you would like to /tell or /whisper, since not all of your buddies know each other, and you probably won\'t want to tell something to everyone of your close friends

Sorry I didn\'t explain myself very clearly on this aspect.

In my world buddies would still be the only \'friends list\' we have (aside from Guilds). When you use the buddies channel, you only see say messages from mutual buddies. So if you want opinions on something you can say it in that channel and it wont be seen by everyone else\'s buddies, just yours. The main use would probably be to right click on the Buddies list item and click a name, which would open your buddies channel and autopopulate \'/whisper MrFriendYouClicked\'.

Other channels of your close friends would just be temporary channels which only come into existance when at least one person types in the name of the chan and starts talking in it. Anyone who knows the name you\'re going to use can type it in too and hear you. If everyone in the room quits it disappears again. This is not another friends list. You can just tell bob down the road over the phone to go into channel \'bobnme\' so we can talk. This would be a great boon to famous players.

You should be able to right-click on all appropriate channels to see who\'s gunna hear you and shortcut /whispers and /tells etc. For example Guild but not World.

[Nadius]

all are good ideas.... but id suggest making several diffrent modes... i.e transparancy

[hook]

Originally posted by Nadius
all are good ideas.... but id suggest making several diffrent modes... i.e transparancy

as options? ...yea, that sounds great ...you could select how your chat window(s) behave while running, getting a private msg, etc.