The 'speak to' option

[Miri]

oryginaly from polish forum:
http://www.cantr.net/forum/viewtopic.ph ... 5&start=15
Not mine idea, just translating the gist

When there are many people in the location, there's often a problem in finding things that are important for our charrie, so players are using the 'whisper to' option (as it makes the sentences thickened and easier to notice for the one being whispered to) and what we get is hell a lot whispering around, what is as irritating as borring.

The 'speak to' option would work similary to 'whisper to', but what we say would be visible to everybody around:

X speaks to Y: "Give me the hammer."

For Y the message would be thickened, similary to whisperings, so it would be easy to notice for him. Everybody around would have a chance to join the talk if it occured interesting for them, and won't have the chance of feeling uncomfortable or alienated. (Who knows, maybe Y is asleep for long, but there's somebody else who'd happily lend/give his/her hammer to X to earn favour/brownie points? )
What's more, it will help in situations where there are more than 2 persons engaged in the bussiness made using whispering. Several times I had to repeat what I was whispered to to 2-3 persons. With the 'speak to' option there wouldn't be a need for it, and there would be 2-3 non-neccessary lines less on the, already messy, screen.

So, to sum up:
- New 'speak to' option, for casual uses when we just want to be sure the person we're talking to won't miss it in the mess;
- The 'whisper to' option remains for what whispering should be used for - things we don't want others to hear

[SekoETC]

Bolding the whispers is something that has been done in HTML by the Polish translator and isn't available for other language groups. Well, translators could add the appropriate HTML tags but I think someone in the staff said that doing that is against the rules and that the feature was going to be disabled somehow. If it's a good feature as many people have mentioned liking it, it should be either hard-coded somehow or it should be clearly stated whether or not LangD is allowed to make this kind of improvements.

But about this suggestion, I think it's a good idea. Not particularly because of the use of bolding but because it would allow directing your words to someone without having to mention their name or making the spoken stuff completely private. Currently the only way of talking publicly to someone is mentioning their name, either aloud or in RP, and it's hard to remember you don't actually know some person's name if they have been referred to in RP.

I think maybe the easiest way of implementing this would be a check-box on the talk to X page, for making it a whisper (as having two separate buttons would just clutter things up). Maybe it could be automatically selected so that people wouldn't accidentally say things aloud when they meant to say it in private. It does less harm if you accidentally whisper when you meant to say something aloud than the other way around. It should also be clearly stated that no other person than the one you're talking to can hear the message if it's made private, since many newbies don't seem to realize it.

[Doug R.]

I'm all for different fonts for whispering. It would make it instantly clear it's a whisper. I can't tell you how many times I've whispered and the recipient answers back in a normal tone. I'm jealous of the Polish!

If it was made global, I'd support the speak to option also. Would be nice to get some text variety. Maybe attacks on characters in bold red? Lots of options.

[Chris]

I agree: let's have visual cues for whispers and other events. Different font colors would be good; just be sure that it's easily readable against the green background. Maybe we could have little icons at the start of some events: a speech bubble for a whisper, a bow for hunting, a sword for hitting a person, skull and crossbones for death, a musical note for a musical instrument playing, etc.

[tiddy ogg]

OK, as long it doesn't hinder me too much. If people can't read : says to you, and interpret that, how is a different font going to help?
For heaven's sake don't get rid of that text , and put up with things if my chars don't react as you expect from different colours , fonts or w.h.y.

[Miri]

I'm afraid adding collors and pics would be too much, Chris *leans to him and whispers theatrically, glancing at tiddy ogg* 'Old Cantrian Geezers' you know... we want it implemented, so lets make it as much edible and implementable as we can
but how about making just the most important things in bold - I mean: whispered to, spoken to, and getting attacked?

[Chris Johnson]

The original suggestion of a globally visible "x speaks to y" has some merit and I can see it as being useful,

I'm moving this to accepted suggestions

We may also consider possibly emboldening the whispers to you/speaks to you .

With regard colours , this was beta tested about 18 months ago and quite frankly is the worst thing we could ever do to Cantr . Anyone over the age of 5 will screw their eyes up in pain ... come to that , the bright 5 year olds who can read will also hate it . This will not be implemented
, the suggestion for different icons for the 200 or so unique events currently used in Cantr is also not going to happen , for similar reasons (and because we don't have the people resources to design and approve them).


tiddy - if you are interested I'd like your opinion about how we implement the bolding around the key events - it can wait until we are ready to implement this whihc will still be awhile.

[Chris]

the suggestion for different icons for the 200 or so unique events currently used in Cantr is also not going to happen , for similar reasons (and because we don't have the people resources to design and approve them).

Every kind of event doesn't need an icon, only events that merit special attention. Forget what I said about a music icon, etc. Whispers to your character merit special attention. One person hitting another merits special attention. Perhaps a few other kinds of events merit special attention.

You can use icons that already exist in Cantr. To make them more visible, I would change the colors; green on green isn't really easy to see. Below is a mock-up. (Names are covered up.)

Before:


After:


With just one event, it might not seem like a big deal. However, when you are looking at a long list of events, you would want important ones to stand out visually in some way.

[SekoETC]

I think highlighting attacks might be reasonable... just as long as the screen doesn't get too chaotic. I think whispers could be in italics rather than bold because bolding gets annoying in large amounts.

[UloDeTero]

Yes, yes, and yes once again!

The original suggestion and Seko's checkbox idea are excellent. Italics would be perfect for whispers, and bold would work well for character-relevent events.
I also think "event icons" would be a great addition. They only need to be small (maybe 10x10px) and they could be orange, green and and white to match the colour scheme. I'm sure the players would love to submit prototypes/suggestions.

[tiddy ogg]

[quote="Chris Johnson"]


tiddy - if you are interested I'd like your opinion about how we implement the bolding around the key events - it can wait until we are ready to implement this whihc will still be awhile.[/quote]

Sure. There may be some tag you can use. Otherwise, I'll do as now and search for "says to you" and the char's name on cluttered pages.

[Antichrist_Online]

I've been working on a Greasemonkey script for this... only good for firefox users but if it works I'll distribute it freely as best I can... As a temp solution