Hilight In Conversation

There was a bit of discussion of conversation hilighting in another thread, but I think it deserves standalone treatment.

An assumption: Coloring text in the chat display is simple; witness object says and various other types of messages.

I'd like to be able to right-click on an avatar, choose "Hilight," and select (or accept a default) color for their chat messages. This would make events, among other things, significantly less confusing, and lessen the need for hosts speaking in all caps and such.

Other things that would be good:

- An easy way to see, edit, and remove all extant hilights. I don't want to have to be looking at an avatar to stop hilighting her, although the "Hilight" button in a pie menu should definitely be stateful as well.

- It'd be nice to have a way to associate a default hilight with a calling card. If I want everything Malachi says to be a grumpy, dull grey color, I should be able to do that. And probably would.

- Default selection of the next available hilight color. If I click on someone new to hilight, the default should be a reasonable and easily discernable color. There should be a list of these colors: 16 or 32 is probably reasonable, although somebody will almost certainly complain about running out. The default should be the first color in the list that I'm not already using as a hilight.

As Second Life grows, the number of people attending and interacting at events (and even impromptu social occasions) will continue to grow. Without RL cues like eye contact, we need tools to keep our conversations intelligible, and I think this would be a good start.

Thoughts?

I would like messages with certain words, like Eggy, to be highlighted.
As a side note, I have taken to temporarily muting people who arent talking to me and are unlikely to start doing so.

This is a great idea. I was wanting this feature at the ABC trivia event. I would have liked our event host's and a few others' text to stand out. It would make calling cards so much more useful.

I endorse this. More Chat options are needed.

Thank you for your endorsement, Oz. I'll be calling on you when I begin my run for the Presidency.

Kewl idea Malle!

I support this product and/or feature. But Mallecho, shouldn't my chat come out in droopy Eeyore font?

Absolutely. 12-point Curmudgeon Sans.

I don't know if I support the color thing, as SL dims text for av's that are farther away from you etc. I do support making a specific av's text larger, or bolder, however. It would be nice if in a teaching or event setting one person could automatically set "priority" on his/herself which would apply the larger/bolder text option to everyone on that property. This could be achieved using not only land owner but also group options for land (as in the case of a club with employees, or a Mentor or Instructor). I would call it "Focus on Taun Patel's Chat Text" or something (where TP = the name of the av).

I don't see how the fact that chat text dims with distance makes colors any less useful: With a reasonable palette, dimmed colors are still easily discernable.

The ability to change font sizes might be nice, but I think it might make conversations more difficult to read. Could be good for folks with color perception problems, though.

I changed my chat to yellow, but it would be great to have an identifiying color for the people you really want to hear. It maybe could be like the "mute window"? You could put the peoples names there that you wanted in a distinctive color.

They do?! *blinkblink*

Dude, I never noticed the distance-dependent dimming. I always thought that was because of time lapsed.

A great place to see the distance-dependent dimming is the Welcome Area. If someone is just within earshot their text will be dimmer. You can also notice it when someone real far away shouts but is just out of earshot. The text is a grayer color.

I understand wanting to colorize the text now. Personally I'd hate it. I vote for both options. You can never have enough hats, gloves or shoes, er ... accessories!

I would personally like the larger text as semantically it would demand your attention and indicate itself being more important (like H1 tags in HTML). So go ahead, LL, put them both in

Aside: All these little interface things seem more geared toward the client. Why not make the client able to accept 3rd party plug ins that can do such wonderous things (I'd personally love to be able to change the oh-so-Windows-looking UI to something more Apple approved ).