Two minor additions to emotes/UI

Ok, since there's a good handful of places in the world now that are roleplaying of one form or another (and the fact that I type slower than my brain processes and usually end up doing /em instead of /me for custom emotes), how about a little Emote button somewhere that'll take whatever input's in the chat box and send it out as an emote? The whole *smiles* thing just sorta breaks the mood for me, I'm picky that way. Blame my many years playing Underlight.

Second thing, if this can already be done feel free to correct me on it: A way to differentiate emotes, be they the canned ones or customs, from regular chat text. I.e. italics, different color, etc.

I think you could do the first part of this for yourself with Gestures, and you could then attach animations, too. The gesture can be configured to insert whatever text you want into the Chat/IM stream. Not the color changing in text, though. That would take a more substantial rewrite, since right now each user can configure the color of the chat. LL would need to add an additional "emote" color and allow users to configure it, or allow users to control what color chat text other users see for them as part of a gesture (or possibly even other times) which could be controversial.

neko

Yes, and no. Gestures work fine for pre-defined. Completely different creature to doing an on-the-fly emote. Think about how many unique actions you take through the course of 1 day, and that's a minimum number of preset gestures you'd have to have created and ready to fire at any given point in time.

What I'm saying is just to have a button like the Say and Shout ones that would do the equivalent of inserting the /me infront of whatever text is in the input box. So, instead of typing "/me types alot of words." you'd type "types alot of words." and hit the Emote button.



Unless there's some odd coding going on it shouldn't be that difficult to make the addition given that there's already an emote parsing routine. Of course, that statement's only based off my experience working for some MMOs that have such a feature.



That, again, assumes use of gestures which isn't the case. Nor was it suggested to allow those doing the emote to force a color to other clients.