Second Life chat is so... PRIMITIVE!

As I see it, the problem with blatant emotes (and probably the reason it was deliberately not added in the first place) is that we have a much more limited field of text-view in SL than we would in an IRC chat room. In IRC, you can have the whole screen filled with the chat log. In Second Life, you have floating text than vanishes after 30 seconds (or however long you set it) or the history window blocking out a portion of your view. We can't let the text take over from the 3D world, since that's why were here and not in IRC, so there shouldn't be massive amounts of fluff filling the chat logs. Linden Labs has been working hard to that end, moving things that were once in chat to pop-ups and dialog boxes. Adding a ": waves!" or "/me waves!" command is going to:

A) generate more chat spam
B) break listen scripts that expect : or / as the first character
C) detract from the immersiveness of the world and revert us back to the pure-text days (might as well make the text green then, or amber)

But there's a problem with relying on gestures and gestures alone: They are time specific. If you aren't looking at the player when they run a gesture, you miss it. And since we have no peripheral vision and our camera's viewpoint may be 40 meters from our body and pointing in the opposite direction.... Gestures are easy to miss.

Now gestures CAN have a text component, but this is of the usual "say" variety. What I suggest is a blending of the two extremes...

Let a gesture's text output use the "/me" format to emit "/me waves." as "Tiger Crossing waves." when I play my wave animation. Then if the gesture was missed, a record of it is in the chat history AND it reads well. This way there is no loss of the emotiveness, and you can always have a otherwise blank gesture set to emote a favorite action if need be.... But we don't have the IRC spammage. Your available emotes are limited by what you have pre-recorded in gestures.


Oh, and while we're at it, let gestures be able to emit on channels other than zero such that "/chan 1234 waving" will send "waving" to chat channel 1234 when you trigger your wave gesture. Then scripts on attachments and nearby objects can react to your animations.

This is very much what I tried to say in my first response. Thanks for being so clear! And I very much like your idea of having a historical recording of gestures (actually I've not used the Chat History window before and I'm surprised that it doesn't already do that ).

Nono don't get me wrong, I'm all for custom animations and would love love love it. But "well we have custom anims" doesn't mean "nope, no emotes, ever". You're exactly right we should have both.

A) generate more chat spam
C) detract from the immersiveness of the world and revert us back to the pure-text days (might as well make the text green then, or amber)
No more or less spammy than seeing the same action enclosed in asterisks, which people already do. Cienna Rand: *waves* takes up as many lines as Cienna rand waves. and I would argue that it detracts from the immesiveness more to *state things like this*.

B) break listen scripts that expect : or / as the first character
There's no reason this text has to be lost forever. It would be silly not to parse it for gestures, or not pass it to listens. Most of the suggestions in this thread would only break scripts which happen to listen for "/me" as the first character.

Any limitation of emotes to just usage by gestures is going to limit what people can express. There will always be things which you cannot do because either Linden (currently) or users (future) have not made the animations. And this will be true until the day we all hook up to motion capture rigs before we play.

If you really want to clean up chat, support hijacking /commands (or ]commands, or @commands, or whatever you prefer) so that we stop seeing things like "anim sit_ground" or "/scan agents cienna". Those are much more jarring than seeing "Your Friend hits you with a trout" instead of "Your Friend: *hits you with a trout*".

LL is supposedly already working on custom gestures, its a feature I want BADLY.

However I don't think it'll hurt anything to add the emotes because of the reasons Cienna has said. I don't think it should automaticly take "/"s anyway, if it has to take emote commands make it defineable by the user, and if its breaking a script of theirs then they can change it.

I don't really like the idea of recording gestures in chat history, think of this, lets say the person is standing there and does a wave gesture, its recorded, now later, they're doing a laugh gesture when you happen to be going up in your chat history, now it totaly cuts off the laugh and makes them wave. Also this could be anoying if you're scrolling through the chat history looking for something and all the sudden you have 10 avatars around you doing gestures they all did in 5 minutes in 20 seconds.

I also don't like the idea that anyone could go back then and make my avatar wave or do another animation just from the history, basicly controling my avatar.

heh i just have to chime in a lil on this...

i've been in text based mucks for on about 10 years now and i've gotten so fluent with the ability to emote that i *rarely* speak anymore...

theres just somethin more poetic about bein able to do

eltee sighs wistfully and looks at the sky

as compared to an animated *sigh* combined with a movin the mouse up and trying to i dunno say SOMETHING.


ontop of that SL really needs to take longer input/have a sizing input window. Text clients have had that as standard for years now... if ya type one line.. have the input bar be one line high... if ya keep goin have the bar rise up a little bit so ya can see BOTH lines as yer typin.. and come on... limitin us to like 128 or even 256 characters? i have SENTENCES that run longer than that (watches grammer teacher roll in grave)..

but seriously theres nothing more aggrivating when chattin than typing out a long line then hittin the end and havin to kinda try an scroll back to cut the sentence short in some logical fashion, say it, and then try'n pick up the next chat line as if ya didn leave off

yeah i understand you point the thing tthat freaked me was this IRC-like chat so i created a little script who allow to type your text in color floating on your head (like in the old good monkey island or a little like the chat bubble in "There"

but have been recently cooled down by ppl who find my script visually intrusive and i dont use it too often...

i fount also ppl who liked it a lot, but since only your text is diplayed like this, the interest come when more than 1 person in a discussion is equiped with this...

i was thinking about selling it but due to the lack of interest and the fact it can really add a plus to the gapme


im gonna give it free

Nice idea, Kyrah, but it suffers from s few major problems...

o Eveyone has to be looking at you to see what you say.

o You can't tell the order in which things were said by different people.

o There's no history listing to see what you missed if you stepped away from the computer for a few moments.

These are some of the things I really disliked about There's chat balloons.The first is made all the worse in SL since you can sent your camera off tens of meters away from your location, or have many script and interface windows open at once.