Second Life chat is so... PRIMITIVE!

As someone who has spent a number of years on MUDs (MUCKs, MUSHEs, MOOs, whatever) the chat and various communication systems on SL are terribly primitive.

Since SL is far, far more a social system than Everquest type games, it should have mroe advanced features as well.

For those that have never used a MUD, here is a quick tutorial.

If you just type Hello there the system responds with...

Drathor Kothari says, "Hello there"

You also have the option to emote or pose something. Using that with waves to the new user! displays...

Drathor Kothari waves to the new user!

It's even smart enough to remove the space after your name when you start a pose with a posessive s. "Drathor Kothari's fingers twitch in annoyance!"

Adding those two simple things makes an amazing diffrence. Yes, some will ignore them, but reading discussions that look like something out of a novel instead of something from an 80s style BBS makes for a way more imersive setting.

The second thing that MUDs do (because of their command line nature) is you can use one letter commands to use those diffrent outputs. So you can say :waves! to use the pose feature. SL has this somewhat.. typing a / at the start will not have you show the typing animation for instance.

What this will REALLY help with is dealing with scripts. I can't imagine how many of us would love to type commands with a character (! or @ maybe) that one, doesn't show us typing, and two, does not show up in chat, but only to listen scripts. It would remove all the anim commands for starters.

I may be nitpicking over this, but I do think this is one area SL really, really needs to improve.. and it should be really easy. The changes should be transparent.. people will type as they always did, but have the option to be more creative. And the text output will look nicer too.

Bumps welcome until the Lindens admit I am right in every way possible.

I don't think we need emotes in chat, I see your point, but when you type /wave your avatar waves, so its more advanced than just text on the screen. Having customized filters would be cool though.

I like how the gestures are done by our avatars and we can add chat to it if we want, it would be good if we could also take out the : though and add whatever.

One thing I can't believe SL doesn't have yet is a chat loging feature, sure we have chat history, but I want something that auto saves that to a chat log thats stored in a folder somewhere.

Other than that I think the chat is pretty good, do we really want emoticons in chat? That'd be so much visual stuff going on, might end up crazy.

When I said emotes, I didn't mean emoticons.

Those should stay far, far away. What I meant was the ability to display your character DOING something and not just saying something.

The guestures are great, but limited of course to a number of predefines. And when 20 people are around, you don't always see them anyway.

I just vastly prefer a chat style that reads nice, and looks less like an AIM chat session and more like a group of people talking. Not everyone HAS to use it, just as everyone now doesn't have to use capital letters and puncuation. But it's nice when they do.

It would be nice to be able to escape commands so that they dont show up in general chat, but do get sent to scripts.

I suspect this could be fairly easy to implement and would be very cool.

Azelda

That seems pretty simple to do: anything typed that begins with a / get sent on channel 1, rather than the general chat channel of 0.

One thing I am missing is how is this:

Cristiano Midnight yawns

And this:

Cristiano Midnight says: * yawn *
(while avatar also yawns and makes a noise).

any different really? I prefer the second one with the combined animation and text being sent out to the client.

There's no reason you couldn't parse emote lines for gestures as well. So you could see "Cienna Rand flips" and the av flips too. But it would allow you do see "Cienna Rand beats Cris with a dead trout" instead of doing the *beats Cris with a trout*. it's just something that helps reading flow a little easier.

And yes I would love to have /text sent to channel 1! Do it. Do it now!

I don't really like the idea of taking away / for channel 1, maybe use something else for it and keep / the way it is. Other than that I wouldn't mind seeing the changes.

I too found the chat system primitive. I mean not even a simple /shout (Control+Enter is so unnatural). But I also don't want to be rash about how it is redesigned.

First, two things mentioned seem mildly in conflict with each other. Categorically banning /slash text to channel 1 kind of stands in the way of the emote text being reinterpretted, let alone how the gestures dialog is allowed to override the defaults.

Another thing that not discussed is how scripts might interact with emote text. For instance...
/me aims at you
might both aim the gun at "you", and prints out "Meekrat aims at you" to the chat window.

Lastly, here is a list of /slash commands I'd like to see:
/me: generic emote command
/whisper: can you believe there isn't a way to do this?
/shout
I brain dead and can't think of any others right now.

And another last thing, the gestures dialog should have an option for each line for selecting whipser/normal/shout(/channel1).


Meek

Question about your /whisper suggestion, that could mean two things, one it could be "/whisper UserNameHere" which is how most chats work, and then your message, then you basicly "whisper" or Instant Message to that person. However, in SL "whisper" can really only be used by objects, and it means that the message wont go as far to surrounding objects, so which were you thinking?

Personaly I think it'd be cool if "/whisper" worked the same way objects whisper. If you would say "/whisper Hello world!" you would say "Hello world!" on channel 0 but it wouldn't go as far (just how object whispers work).

Maybe also add an /IM UserName or /PM UserName, but then you run into, ok is it case sensative? And what if you spell something wrong or accidently type in the same name? So I don't really think we should have an IM chat command since names are usualy pretty hard to spell and type.

Also, suggestion, if they do add /whisper, /me, or the ability to say something on an object only channel, it should be added to the custom gestures, so that way you could have a gesture that makes you do something and whisper it, or say it outloud, or emote it, or whatever.

If we do have the ability to say something on an object channel it should be limited to one channel, otherwise you could have people commanding your objects on the channel when you don't want them to (of course they'd have to know the channel, but still). LL would have to pick a channel, which not sure how hard that is, maybe do like -1 as the channel or something, cuse suddenly saying "ok you can't have this channel anymore cuse we now use it for this", everyone might not like that.

I like the idea of putting text starting with / on a specific official "script command" channel. As a bonus, the ability to lsee text on this channel should be an option.

/me <emote text>

"/me" should be treated as emotes, as in:

I type:
/me wonders where everybody went

The chat prints to everyone:
Kex Godel wonders where everybody went

It would also be nice if this gets passed on to the script command channel in raw form.

/r <message>

Typing /r should send an Instant Message to the last person who sent you an IM, and should not be passed on to the script command channel.

/im <name> <message>

/im should send an instant message to <name>, and not be passed on to the script command channel.

/shout <message>

obvious.


I'm not sure whether or not /whisper would be a good idea, as it could confuse people who assume it means IM.

I don't know, I really don't want more extra chat lines if someone isn't talking.

I don't need to see:

Camille Serpentine waves
Camille Serpentine eat flies
Camille Serpentine sits down
etc. ad naseum....


or why see:
Camille Serpentine wonders where everyone went
instead of saying:
where'd everybody go?
- it's all within the chat range, so if av's are out of range it wouldn't matter if they emoted.

It would be a lot of extra noise on a busy screen already - imagine it at events.

I am all about emotes. I would presume simple to implement, but yet will allow a more human touch to things. Saying actions just seems, well, so computerish. The only thing I can see against them is it removes a degree of realism from SL, since we would have this telepathic message that Sam Blushes, but Sam's face is still pale.

I'm all for emotes.

It doesn't clutter up the chat any more to see:

Kex Godel smacks her forehead in embarassment.

vs.

Kex Godel: *smacks forehead in embarassment*

You can't just do everything with AV animations.

To not display as text would mean people who weren't looking at my AV at the time will not know that I just did an AV-animation (if one is even available).

Sure, I could have just said "doh I'm stupid" in the chat instead of expressing that concept with an emote style, but what if I didn't feel like being so plain, or what if it would have been more socially appropriate or humorous to use an emote where plan text speech would have sufficed?

I'd probably take a guess that anyone who has spent some time on IRC or BBSes will know the value of the standard emote, and that it's absence in a chat medium is more often thought to be odd, rather than the norm.

I wouldn't mind your suggestions kex, however I would like to add...

For emotes like /me I would also like if you had the option to add an avatar gesture with those, so I could do:

/me smacks forehead

and my avatar would also smack its forehead along with the chat outputting:

Oz Spade smacks forehead

Also it'd be cool if you could have the option to change "me" to something else like "emote" etc. I've gotten into the weird habbit of typing out /emote rather than /me because I used iChat and for some reason picked up the whole emote thing, lol. Not that I couldn't adjust, but I think it would be cool to have that also. If not oh well.

I agree with Camille Serpentine's concern. We have to be careful. Something like

1. Veloso Lippmann sighs heavily.

Might be cool. But something like

1. Veloso Lippmann disagrees.

would be unfortunate. Emoting is one thing. Populating everyone's screen with arbitrary sentences starting with your name will cause a whole bunch of textual garbage that breaks the illusion of a "Second Life".

On the other hand, having some prefix character (or even a pull-down-tab option) to speak on channel 1 would be GREAT! This is an even better and cleaner idea than the recent one to simply hide lines starting with "/" on channel 0 from avs, but not scripts.

That shouldn't be a problem. If /me is added to the gesture list the same way that /afk is done now it would be configurable whether to also do an animation.

Perhaps the whole chat emote thing could be handled by a generalization of the current emote list.

Add a checkbox to each row of the emote panel to select if the emote is to be printed as a comment or as a text action.

If it's a comment, it works as it is now.

If it's checked as a text action, then the trigger text keyword will activate as long as it's at the beginning of your chat text string. The rest of your chat text string will be printed in action-style prose.

This way, you could add multiple action text triggers so that you can use either /me or /emote and they'll both work, and as a BONUS you could transparently add additional action text triggers which also play AV animations.

To explain this concept clearly, let me demonstrate in pseudocode (this has nothing to do with LSL or any other real language):

chat_event(string text){

    for(integer i = 0 ; i < gEmotes.getEmoteListLength() ; i++){

        Emote emote = gEmotes.getEmoteByIndex(i);

        if( 0 == string_index(text, emote.getChatInput) ){
            perform_emote(emote, text);
        }

    }

}

perform_emote(Emote emote, string text){

    playSound( emote.getSoundName() );
    performAvatarAnimation( emote.getAnimationName() );

    if( emote.isActionText() ){

        integer prefix_len = get_string_length( emote.getChatInput() );
        integer text_len = get_string_length(text);

        prefix_len ++; // skip space

        // separate emote text from it's chat_input trigger text
        string emote_text = get_substring(text, prefix_len, text_len);

        // display action text in local chat
        output_chat_text("* " + getAvatarName() + " " + text);

    }else{

        // do the same thing we've always done
        output_chat_text(getAvatarName() + ": " + emote.getChatInput() );

    }

}

Emotes are just as much chat as basic chat. You must not use IRC if you do not understand the communicative aspect of emote text. It allows a person to express things without "saying" them. It all ammounts to the same thing in the end, but anything that faciliates expression is a good thing in my book. Some things probably wont be said as they are in IRC because of the visual aspect of SL. You don't need to tell people you sat. You just sit. I suppose there would be some ammount of redundant emotes/action but I am sure we can all accept some little bit of redundancy. As for eating flies? That's your own business.



As to how to indicate an emote when typing and such thats an interesting issue. I would only suggest make it as natural as possible. Many people use IRC and understand that well enough. The learning curve isn't high and its a pretty good model for text chat.
I do like the idea of having messages starting with a text marker not being displayed in text chat. perhaps LL could allow for this: when an avatar speaks with the text marker "/" they do not make chat animations and the text including the marker is relayed to channel 1
Edit:
*end of I would only suggest*
*start Baba takes a few interesting concepts and goes wild* Yea, I didn't know what would happen when I started typing, honest.
End Edit:
It wouldn't really interfear with animations too much I think and the client could listen on channel 1 and any emote commands such as /me could be parsed over to chat. And scripts get their silent commands because the client only listens for /me and /shout. /im would not be sent in channel 1 of course but would be converted to a direct IM. Also an animation could be keyd for /shout and /whisper if you wanted them and possibly /im could get its own animation as well. So people would know you are in private coversation. All animations can be disabled anyway so if you wish to you could disable them.

so you can have your command /dance to start your dance script and also the custom text on channel 0 or custom emote sent such as Baba Yamamoto starts to dance. or maybe Baba Yamamoto says: Break it down! Party Time.

It doesn't really matter what channel it's on because it doesn't interfear with script trafic on the channel. It doesn't need to be a special script command channel the script will recoginise whatever you tell it to listen for. If you want it to listen for you emote /me eats a pickle then it will. All text with the "/" marker goes to the same channel unedited.

I agree. An extended version of the custom gestures dialog should allow a user to customize any prefix or command to set range, select sound & animation, select emote or say, and set channel (0 or 1, or maybe different text per channel for descript/command text). Maybe this is just an "Advanced" version of the dialog where most details are hidden in the "Basic" version.



Anm

I like Kex's idea.

I don't want adding "/" before my text to automaticly reroute it to a certain channel, if anything I want to be able to specify the channel/marker if it *has* to do that.

But yeah I think we're all saying the same thing, so lets just get it implemented!

I think this thread really highlights a problem I've seen on 3D worlds. You bring in pictures and visible avatars, but you take away control over expression because the users aren't capable of dictating reality: on text-based multiplayer roleplay environment, reality is dictated by consensus. You say you do this, and people accept it, and react accordingly. On a 3D world, there's a barrier in between - the server has its own idea of reality. You can say you do something, and if the server agrees, everyone sees it and that becomes real. It's like playing Zork - you can say anything you like, but your actions are limited to a handful of verbs.

MU* and IRC have a much wider "vocabulary of expression" because the tool with which you dictate and agree reality is the written word and (give or take) everyone can write. But 3D animation is hard. Not everyone can do it, and so the environment simplifies things by having preset gestures and animations, and suddenly your ability to express yourself is limited by this preset vocabulary.

Asking for emoting tools is really just an expression of that frustration. I don't think we actually want most emotes. We want things like thought-bubbles when we think, or physical animations. It seems absurd and kludgy to write *hits Thingy Swanson with a fish* on a 3D visual world and not actually doing it visually. Same with emoting. You don't really want to type /me do-wops Scatman Crowthers and have it show in a text window without your avatar reacting. It's just how it's been done on text-only worlds. 3D worlds are a different medium and the communication methods differ.

I think what we really need is the ability to create and share character animations. So someone can write a "scratch chin" animation, or a spanking action, or whatever, and every day that passes, our vocabulary of expression expands. After all, everyone's pretty much the same bipedal two-armed shape - make the keyframes relative (so "move to this part of the face" rather than "move 10 units right and 20 units up"

Well, yes.. I really do want to type /me whacks Pendari with a large trout. Why? I don't necissarily have to the time say "hold on to the conversation guys I have to model a trout and a whacking gesture, give me 20 minutes". No matter how many custom animations you have there will still be one-offs. And emoting makes them read better.

Very nicely said Cienna

Okay look, perhaps I came up with a crappy example solution. I'm sorry that I put you on the defensive with my previous wording. If I knew The Answer, I'd be raking in the cash.

There's absolutely no reason that your idea and my idea can't work at the same time. I could have my library of gestures that animate my character based on keywords or commands, and if you know you don't have the gesture you want, you emote it instead. In fact that's pretty much what you and I do already on Second Life. Only difference is that when you don't have the animation, you write *thingies* instead of /me thingies. It's what programmers call syntactic sugar.

I think it's a very mundane approach to say, "Oh there's no way to do this properly, let's just have emotes instead". If the Lindens thought that way, Second Life would be IRC with pictures. It's also not "well that's Good Enough(tm)". If we settled for Good Enough, this would be another There.com. We're supposed to be creative; artists and dreamers.

I'll concede that emoting is a pragmatic solution. It's one that could be coded today, go live next week and would slightly improve the presentation of textual chat. But it still feels kludgy. And why not allow us to make and share animations? Was my idea so bad? We can build houses and cars, magical rainbow fountains and roulette wheels, but we can't make our avatars reach up and pick their noses if we want them to? Let me at least believe that it would be a nice thing?