A suggested modification of Text Bubbles

Hello everyone, Linden and Lifer alike.

I must say I enjoy the new Bubble Text concept, but there is a problem with it that I believe I have the solution to.

Currently, when you have the Text Bubbles option turned on, you can only read what people type if you look directly at them. This makes listening to distant people very difficult, as well as making conversations which happen behind you impossible to 'hear'. You simply wouldn't know if someone was calling out from behind you.

My solution to this problem involves putting all text bubbles onto the screen, instead of hovering specifically over the avatar. For any text bubble that is far away or off the screen, the bubble would appear on the screen relative to the position of the speaker in 3D space. That way you would not only know who was talking, but from which direction you hear them. I believe this will not only make Text Bubbles effective, but in fact superior to the classic 'corner of the screen' text which I currently prefer.

So that's my suggestion; floating text bubbles to let you hear everything. I hope you like it!

In addition, the chat text could be 'faded' or made more transparent, the further away the speaker is from the listener, giving an easy gauge of how far away the people chatting are. This applies equally to chat bubbles and the old chat text system.

Unless 1.6 already does that. I haven't logged in since the update.

Or... Just black out all the graphics (which will improve your framerate for better text reading) and randomly position the words anyone says somewhere on the screen in various random colors. Oh! And make them move about constantly.

Okay, this has been humor. I'd like to see as little floating text over the screen as possible. This is a graphical world, not a textural one.

In SL I can't hear the direction of voice information nor can I always witness the timing of the different parts so I can't utilize the ability to track a conversation based on space. This makes shattering the conversation into spatial parts useless to my brain and a step backward in the scope of things... we are beyond comic strips here.

~Lefty

how about they combine the chat bubbles with the normal scrolling chat. so you will be able to use the scrolling chat and the bubbles at the same time. i keep my chat history open because i like having the scrolling chat to look at and it shows the chat from people who's bubbles are not on the screen.

i don't use chat bubbles for that reason. I would like to be able to read what everyone is saying incase something peaks my interest. Keeping them off allows the normal chat to show. The chat history is a bulky window that just gets in the way hehe