My suggestion for increasing social-interaction or "RP": Chatbubbles!

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My suggestion for increasing social-interaction or "RP": Chatbubbles!

Post by BONERMASTER » #525490

Hey-ho!

Every once in a while, the topic roleplay comes up, and it's diminishing appearance in the face of rampant power gaming, and you guys know how busy these topics get with all their debates and whatnot.
I think, what people really want, is not necessarily roleplay, but just having more social-interaction. Because this game moves fast as shit, and you can only communicate by making a full-stop and typing out a text message. In your casual everyday department-workplace, that may be just annoying, but add the stakes by for example having an officer approach a suspicious person and what not, you are putting yourself at the complete mercy of your opposite man.

And nothing short of a voice-comm or complete rework of the game would really change that, I think. You have baystation for example, that doesn't change the game itself to allow for RP, but instead chains-down the gamespeed by establishing and enforcing it's strict rules. But that's not an option we want to use, and personally, don't think it is very appealing either.

Gamespeed is only one part of the equation, however. What compounds the issues caused by that, is the total clutter in the chat window. You have radio, interaction messages, system messages, emotes and what not in a tiny window, and look, I am an elite gamer and all, but even I'm hard pressed to pay attention to the chat when I'm busy, if the windows that pop up don't just block it out completely to begin with. The person you are talking with could not only just walk out of your screen before you are done typing, even if you stand right next to them and write something, they could just not be seeing it.

And here is where chat bubbles could really help out. We're both transporting the chat out of the cluttered tiny window, and we're making communication a lot more visible as well. Of course, this is far from catapulting the game to a roleplay friendly state, and the many underlying issues that I mentioned are not undone by that. But, it's a good step towards this direction, and, in my opinion, having chatter not be transmitted solely in the cluttered window is just a general quality of life improvement.


What are your thoughts on that? I'm aware that this has been brought up before, probably many, many times, and that some of you already have their set opinion on that. I would kindly ask though, especially in the light of recent dramatic changes, to at least consider this proposal, and see the benefit it could bring to the game. Thank you for taking your time, I'm looking forward to your response!
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Re: My suggestion for increasing social-interaction or "RP": Chatbubbles!

Post by skoglol » #525511

I am very glad we do NOT have chat bubbles for a few reasons. Those are long winded, situational and you'll probably disagree with me.

What I do think we could benefit from is something they have on goon: speech sounds. Every time you speak, there is a sound that others can recognize and start looking around and in chat for what was said. Personally I think the goon ones are annoying. We'd need to find something good and fitting for tg, as well as make it fall off with distance so we can judge importance based on the sound alone. It could be a good way to make people look away from the ui that covers their chat or the wiki they alt tabbed to, as well as drag people out of their daydreaming. Nothing is worse than standing in line for chemistry, and the chemist is so busy tabbing back and forth from wiki that he didnt notice you said anything.
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Re: My suggestion for increasing social-interaction or "RP": Chatbubbles!

Post by wesoda25 » #525531

i dont want chat bubbles bc then everyone will know how bad I am at typing
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Re: My suggestion for increasing social-interaction or "RP": Chatbubbles!

Post by Tarchonvaagh » #525566

wesoda25 wrote:i dont want chat bubbles bc then everyone will know how bad I am at typing
Also I disabled it on cm for myself because its just generally... weird and annoying, not fit for tg
Skog's idea is better
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Re: My suggestion for increasing social-interaction or "RP": Chatbubbles!

Post by Shadowflame909 » #525571

skoglol wrote:I am very glad we do NOT have chat bubbles for a few reasons. Those are long winded, situational and you'll probably disagree with me.

What I do think we could benefit from is something they have on goon: speech sounds. Every time you speak, there is a sound that others can recognize and start looking around and in chat for what was said. Personally I think the goon ones are annoying. We'd need to find something good and fitting for tg, as well as make it fall off with distance so we can judge importance based on the sound alone. It could be a good way to make people look away from the ui that covers their chat or the wiki they alt tabbed to, as well as drag people out of their daydreaming. Nothing is worse than standing in line for chemistry, and the chemist is so busy tabbing back and forth from wiki that he didnt notice you said anything.
How about a "BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH.."

like the parents from peanuts
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Re: My suggestion for increasing social-interaction or "RP": Chatbubbles!

Post by skoglol » #525578

I dont want something spammable. I dont want something annoying. I want a short sound that notifies you that someone spoke near you.

I hopped on goon and got you a sample of their sound. You can pick between a few of these in character creation. Ignore the general sound pollution, thank fuck we arent like this.
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Re: My suggestion for increasing social-interaction or "RP": Chatbubbles!

Post by Shadowflame909 » #525589

skoglol wrote:I dont want something spammable. I dont want something annoying. I want a short sound that notifies you that someone spoke near you.

I hopped on goon and got you a sample of their sound. You can pick between a few of these in character creation. Ignore the general sound pollution, thank fuck we arent like this.
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I remember when we temporarily had that space-ship building job that you see right there.

Too bad it was too un-optimized for us.

Also, dig the sound. Reminds me of a skype ping/facebook messenger poke noise.
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Re: My suggestion for increasing social-interaction or "RP": Chatbubbles!

Post by skoglol » #525603

If you are serious about the blah blah blah you can supply an example soundbite for us. The more you write, the longer the blah blah blah goes on :honkman:
Keep in mind that we might have a ton of people talking nearby at once, so anything too busy would be detrimental. Even talking a lot on goon gets a bit annoying due to their talking sound.
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Re: My suggestion for increasing social-interaction or "RP": Chatbubbles!

Post by skoglol » #525605

I also wouldnt mind seeing varying font size of say messages based on distance from you. You are more likely to chat with someone close than far away, so big text might be more relevant. Im not sure if this is even remotely doable from either a performance standpoint or in goonchat in general.

Also adding a yell prefix/verb akin to whisper, which increases the range people can hear you talk. Could be useful for getting a hold of the robos when you cant see them in the office and similar. Restrictions apply. Optionally, a stronger effect from megaphone.
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Re: My suggestion for increasing social-interaction or "RP": Chatbubbles!

Post by zxaber » #525609

We do already have the ability to yell in the form of exclamation marks. It bolds the text after two, I believe.
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Re: My suggestion for increasing social-interaction or "RP": Chatbubbles!

Post by cacogen » #525611

I was thinking of adding a say-to verb that is slightly larger for the recipient and sender than usual messages. I was hoping to fix the problem of being in a crowded area like the shuttle and not knowing who is saying what to whom.

Have also thought about a "cocktail party effect" type thing where if your name is said, the message is more prominent. But we sort of already have that with the ability to set text to be highlighted. I always use that for my job title, first name and surname in separate fields.

I'm editing this and the guy below who posted the Maplestory (I think) screenshot is right (I was going to post this from RuneScape) that text above heads would quickly overwhelm the window.

Finally, I don't think anyone's mentioned that we did have chat bubbles at one point. I hadn't realised they were gone until this thread. They appeared after someone said something. They deliberately avoided appearing while someone was typing, because typekilling is already a shitty tactic some people use.

I've never played on Citadel or on Goon since the chat sounds, but if done properly both seem like a good way to denote which character is speaking and give the avalanche of chat a filter by prioritising speakers closer to you.
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Re: My suggestion for increasing social-interaction or "RP": Chatbubbles!

Post by BONERMASTER » #525612

Sound is alright and all, I think in my opinion it's more supplementary in nature than a feature on it's own. I remember that hippie had a text to speech thing for a while. While it was super buggy and stopped sometimes altogether, it was an interesting addition, and I think it would be really cool if we could pull that off and optimize it.

Still, it shouldn't just come on it's own, especially if we just throw in blah-blah sounds, it wouldn't be a good use of it's full potential. I like the idea of changing the fonts based on distance and how loud you speak. I think we could work that just as well into chatbubbles. Decrease the size of it the further you are away, and it would lessen the visual on-screen spam.

Or we could also make them more transparent, based on distance. Make them transparent in general. The idea I had in mind was, that the bubbles would be very transparent from the get-go, so if you had people writing long sentences, you could still see the environment underneath it without problems. I'll show you a sample of what I mean:
Spoiler:
Image
That sort of style is what I have imagined. Wouldn't be all too intrusive, but still be visible enough to have a point. And, again, we still could morph the shit out of that so half your screen is not filled up with chatboxes. How does that sound?
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Re: My suggestion for increasing social-interaction or "RP": Chatbubbles!

Post by skoglol » #525617

Sorry for hijacking your thread, it just kinda tied in with the social interaction part.

I realize now you are talking full fledged chat bubbles containing actual chat. I missed that in the OP, and thought you meant the "user is typing something" bubble that some servers already have. I dont have a strong opinion on actual chat bubbles to be honest, other than we would have to carefully think that through to avoid abuse.

Lets avoid something like this though
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zxaber wrote:We do already have the ability to yell in the form of exclamation marks. It bolds the text after two, I believe.
True. Right now it just changes the span though, but suffixing with !! is acceptable too.
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Re: My suggestion for increasing social-interaction or "RP": Chatbubbles!

Post by Naloac » #525657

Citadel has the text size change based on location which I think be a neat idea for us to steal with also stealing the idea of talk sounds from goon.
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Re: My suggestion for increasing social-interaction or "RP": Chatbubbles!

Post by deedubya » #525660

Naloac wrote:Citadel has the text size change based on location which I think be a neat idea for us to steal with also stealing the idea of talk sounds from goon.
I've been playing on Citcode more recently, and I'm not sure that this is such a good idea with the current speed at which tg operates. It doesn't necessarily make text any bigger. Rather, it makes text extremely small if you're past a certain distance threshold. People already miss text as they're zooming by on their quest to tide more gamer loot, I don't think making the text smaller would serve to help that.

Although on the other hand, it might help people get a little more involved in the experience. Having someone give you the Stone Cold "WHAT?" when your text is too small, getting you to come closer and have a proper conversation? It's a nice touch that I've enjoyed on those other servers. It does help with immersion.
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Re: My suggestion for increasing social-interaction or "RP": Chatbubbles!

Post by oranges » #525756

skoglol wrote:I am very glad we do NOT have chat bubbles for a few reasons. Those are long winded, situational and you'll probably disagree with me.

What I do think we could benefit from is something they have on goon: speech sounds. Every time you speak, there is a sound that others can recognize and start looking around and in chat for what was said. Personally I think the goon ones are annoying. We'd need to find something good and fitting for tg, as well as make it fall off with distance so we can judge importance based on the sound alone. It could be a good way to make people look away from the ui that covers their chat or the wiki they alt tabbed to, as well as drag people out of their daydreaming. Nothing is worse than standing in line for chemistry, and the chemist is so busy tabbing back and forth from wiki that he didnt notice you said anything.
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Re: My suggestion for increasing social-interaction or "RP": Chatbubbles!

Post by Cobby » #525774

tfw talking a lot to hide your metafriend under the chat bubble from the police
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Re: My suggestion for increasing social-interaction or "RP": Chatbubbles!

Post by crashmatusow » #525818

Hiding cult bases behind wgw chat bubbles
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