Communication is vital

Published: 2013-05-18

Author: Teddi

A problem that I’ve been tackling recently was handling communication in Roleplay. Pre-existing gamemodes do it in a nasty, messy, inefficient way which causes issues over time. Another key issue with this is actually identifying characters via text, seeing as we don’t allow for voice-based communication (for good reasons).

The former isn’t too interesting in how it has been solved, although it’s still effectively ongoing there’s now an appropriate way for messages to be sent out to players within certain distances and so on. When players start playing at the moment however, you may find things such as walls don’t accurately obstruct the text seen and so on because we need to gauge how well the current implementation works. Assuming it all works well, things like obstructions will be fine.

The more (fun) solution to the second problem was actually identifying people via their chat messages. Having a huge block of text before their message like “Tall hulking man: ” just seems inappropriate and pretty much kills off the actual chatter, especially if people were to have large descriptions (assuming we used these of course). As a result and some experimentation I’ve actually come up with a solution that’s versatile and also quite effective should be people want to “impersonate” others. Effectively upon character creation we quickly do some maths and then assign a shade of a colour to your character. What this means is that when they’re (or you) are chatting, in the chatbox your name will have a particular colour which will be identifiable to you. There is the obvious issue of what happens if people start getting similar colours which in itself isn’t so much an issue as many people in our day and age share similar attributes, including their voice.

It’s not the most flavoursome blog post, however it was a milestone which we had to pass appropriately and ideally without any real issues.

Another blog post should be coming along in the next few days with a little more fun information.

Forum Thread: http://www.bbservers.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?8216-Communication-is-Vital

Also, because Eurovision: