Your Two Cents Goes HERE!

[vilehelm]

Okay this is the idea thread. What we need to do is just spit out some ideas. Jesse and Squirrel can then take it or leave it but we need to throw in the kitchen sink here so that they have enough to chew on.

Most of the ideas will probably be rejected for various reasons and that's cool. Just throw them out there, you never know.

Also no judging and definitely no dising someone else's idea. We don't want to get bogged down in viability at this point either. Start dreaming.

I sit in a lot of brand and project planning brainstorms. This is going to seem corny but one of the exercises we do is "I wish".

"I wish that i could distinguish seperate conversations within a chat thread with color"

"I wish that i could have a distinct style to my chat postings (like red bold italics) and that the app would remember my style"

"I wish that i had some buttons to hit that would automatically format my text as a flame or an lol like an emticon"

"I wish I could keep my cool afro avatar or have some other icon for the chat room."

"I wish i had a donut"

I gotta go do some work but that's my five minutes worth.

NEXT!

[Ricod]

- "Well, I wish mine looked like Natalie Portman !" *sigh, I oughta watch less Sci Fi*
- "I wish that it reacts to certain keywords and change it to the actual meant text, like [ crosspost ] here does."
- "I wish it has notification options, so that once minimized I know its triggerd, and that u can set the triggers manually."
-"I wish you could save a sessions or part of it."
-"I wish you could define your message as a vital one, so the unimportant ones (to the subject) are ignored when saved."
-"I wish we can still use those nice smilies and others like Trillian"
-"I wish it'll have a few small sound effects built in."
-"I wish that I could change the layout on the fly, like in MAX 4."
-"I wish that it remembers my settings."
-"I wish we can exploit it later and earn some money for the site with it, so we can get a dedicated server."

And I wish I could think of a nice avatar that could represent me AND still be nice to look at ...

[red penguin]

A developers dream, eh? Looking for any testers there Vile?

hmmmnnn... I like this game of "I wish..." although I gotta school Rico there on his usage of it......it's a little dig, that's all!....I'm a freakin' teacher!

"I wish I had more experience with these chat rooms so I could wish for something here!!"

There's my worthless two cents on that...

Sure I'm with ya Vile...they all sound plausable. I guess I'll have to come up with something a bit better...

[vilehelm]

Originally posted by red penguin
although I gotta school Rico there on his usage of it

Usually during brainstorms if someone makes a judgement they get kooshs thrown at them (little stringy rubber toys). It's everyone's favorite part!

Actually I'm going to go cruise mIRC tonight to see if i can think of anything else

[Ricod]

I know ... My english sucks from time to time, 'specially if I'm not fully awake. Could be worse though ...

But since ur a teacher :
it's a little dig
Whats dig ?

Also, I know its faulty ... but why ? I know it sounds weird when I read it, but .. why ?

[red penguin]

Hey...

my apologies...

I realize it's difficult not in your native tongue and we (or I) overlooked that...

*kicks self in arse*

[vilehelm]

Third attempt at posting this...

It would be cool if the rooms could have distinct objects in them (i know this is text based chat) what if you could type in acertain string to cause a reaction "kick the cow" makes a moo sound... i don't know something to play off of and give it that real "environment" feel.

Also the emote function from the gMUD is great. It would be cool to be able to syntax your chat so that somethings are statements, some are actions, some are thoughts.

Squirrel bellows: Show me the CASHEWS!
Squirrel stuffs cashew in his cheek pouch.
Squirrel wonders "How can I conquer the world?"

reacting to punctuation was a cool thing too, almost forgot that.

[20 Ton Squirrel]

Okay, people have some great ideas so far. Nothing seems beyond our skill here. As far as the client remembering any of your settings, I would think that the use of cookies would settle that NO problem. Text formatting would be simple if the Output window was HTML enabled, the engine would dish out tagged lines for color or formatting. That's easy stuff.

Smilies in the text might get too memory intensive after a while, so I don't think that would be a good idea. Putting the avatars in would be easy if I could get the layout of the forum and use that PHP stuff that builds SWFs on the fly. I think that the avatar should be next to the user name in the Who listing and nowhere else or we'll run into the same memory troubles.

Getting the client to save a session should be easy as well, we all know how Flash can save variables to a text file. It probably wouldn't be very readable, though.

Making emotes is easy, that wasn't a feature gMUD. I'll just leave in the use of the :, which allows you to act out just like Vile's example of me devouring cashews.

The automatic grammar for exclaiming, asking, and saying is a native feature of the engine as well. If you type:

say Are you alright?

The engine outputs,

Grimslayde asks, "Are you alright?"

You can even direct your chat to a person like:

(to Vile) Grimslayde exclaims, "I think your fro just caught on fire!"

Now... as for making the chat a virtual environment rather than just a chat display... the engine is already set up as a VR with rooms and objects to interact with. I can get pretty goofy and clever about coding reactions and such on them (like mooing cows, if ya want). I wanted to cut all that out so that we don't confuse newbie users with stuff. But if ya'll want it I can leave it in.

So keep 'em coming. Nothing so far seems out of scope!

[Tink]

i wish i could connect to it through my works firewall
i wish it had private messaging
i wish it had private massaging
i wish for a lil buddy list (:( although i aint got not buddies in mynlist now, i think that'll change once its real time)

i wish i could think of a few more wishes

BLEEDA

[pinkaboo]

I wish I could connect through a firewall too!
Also, I wish for an experience that would be a cross between Snowcrash VR (without the virus of course) and the Hobbit on C64. :0)
I would hope that you could record snippets of conversation for future reference, even if that was just the ability to cut and paste into a holding folder, (or even into notepad if you had to be messy)
hmm, I (perhaps) wish that when you asked for a description of who you were talking to (or looked where you were) it would appear in a separate window so that the conversation doesn't get lost and confused and scroll madly up the screen.

think that'll do for now

K

[red penguin]

Good idea for the profile thing. Click on user name and have a popup with any pertinant info...with avatar!

[20 Ton Squirrel]

We could easily have another window or a popup thingie for user descriptions and such. In fact, I had an idea about the emote icons. If we are to have a Who List somewhere we can put an option in for users to display emote icons along with their avator. So each listing in the Who List box would consist of a movieclip that had the user's Avatar, then name, then emote icon. The user could change the icon depending on mood or whatever. Kinda like Microsoft Chat (not that I ever used it).

[red penguin]

all sounds feasible....Anybody creating a "list" of sorts or we just using this as that list and when the thread is "closed"...THEN that list will be made.

Just thinking of organization...

[Tink]

i wish we could instantly send small files to each other like icq and yahoo messanger

BLEEDA

[vilehelm]

ooh oooh

i like the squirrels idea. that way you build a set of avitars and then depending on how your message was syntaxed you could show a different avitar.

like normally i would just have my nice fro but maybe i could photoshop the hell out of it and show a flaming afro or a pukey afro (ew)...damn that seems a little out there.

i guess that it could be set in the profiles. hmmm i'll let that one fester today and see if i can figure it out a little more.

[20 Ton Squirrel]

Where's Maccer on this thread? This community project was his idea anyway! We should get him involved, dern it. I mention the Great Gonzo because he had that PHP-wrapper thing that could take a JPG and make a SWF on the fly with it. That would be great for loading in the avatar.

I'm gonna PM Maccer and pester him.

[zoomfreddy]

ok, ok...let's make wishes!!!

i wish the client works multiplatform... you know... Pc, Mac, etc...

i wish it can save the texts written...

i wish it can can be "skineable"...so all the "design freaks" can make their own ones....

i wish it have sound alerts (a la "messenger" stuff)...

i wish the heads in this proyect let me do the sounds nedded :)...

and that's it...for now....


:cool:

[20 Ton Squirrel]

The client will be multiplatform because it will be Flash-based. Thus, if your machine can open a SWF in a browser, you can get on. If yer machine can't then you are on the wrong site, mister!!!

We haven't had anyone mention audio effects yet. That's a prime idea, go volunteer to Vilehelm and/or Red Penguin!

[zoomfreddy]

je, je....yes, 20 Ton...you right about the flash based stuff, but the problem is with the browsers, some things that work in Pc browsers, don't work in Mac browsers an viseversa( passing variables via javascript, some stuff made in ASP, and even some xml stuff )so, to be truly multiplatform, the chat client engine have to deal with that stuff....
:cool:

BTW, i've pm'ed Vilehelm and Ricod already:)

[Jesse]

I wish:

it supported /me like mIRC. Eg "/me kiccs 20Ts" outputs "Jesse Kicks 20TS" in a diff color to normal text
for it not get TOO colorful. I'm all in favour of color but big red bold text is anoying when tehre's too much.
for formatting to include color, bold, italic. No size changes.
for it to go without icons at first. As much as I like them, populating the screen with them will be a bitch.
for it to be skinnable. Skins rock and they will encounrage non-scripters to get into the design process.
for it to support private chat sessions perhaps.
for activatable audio prompts, so that if I minimize it while waiting for a responce, I know when the responce comes. They should also be able to be turned off like on ICQ because otherwise they just get annoying.
that it could be entirely Flash 5 based to allow for better multi-platform (and I mean all platforms including pocketPC and WebTV) capability. Flash 5 has huge market penetration now and while Flash 6 will probably go the same way, it will take two years or so. This is another eason why I'm anti it being popup. If the environment is in a standard window and other non-essentials are in popups we wont have FSCommadn and POST problems, etc.
as much as possible for us to use server side scripting and actionscripting only. Other lcient side scripts like avaScript should be avoided for compatibility reasons.
I had made this list AFTER reading hte eniter post as half my suggestions have been made already :)


Comments re: others wishes:

Saving specific data from a chat would be great. Imagine if you could scroll up and click an opening post, then scroll down and click a closing post and get all the data between those two posts... It wouldn't be that impossible if the whole thing is XML based since we could pass the XML object to a PHP script which could read out the requested text into a text file in the browser. That makes saving it easy too.
Popup profiles (HTML based) sounds good to me. We can rip info from the vBulletin DB.
Saving personal color settings, etc shoul dbe possible using cookies.
File sending = no way. Sorry but since Flash doesn't support direct conection everything w*ould have to come via the server and that's not possible for many reasons.
Multi-platform support is a must I think.

[Jesse]

Hehe after readin gmy post perhaps I should wish it had a spell checker built in. God damn tendisinivitis or whatever it's called, my whole left hand is numb! Try typing with one hand!

[Ricod]

ehm ... why were u typing with one hand ? (maybe I shouldn't interfere in other people's private moments, but I'm curious and nosey :) )

I'm all for the spell checker ! Is this possible ? Sometimes its hard to read certain posts.

And private rooms ! That's great ! When people go like :

anonymous : oh, pinkaboo ! Your hair is so ... so ... pink !
someoneElse : and your *boink*'s are like ... like cashews !
chatModerator (and most others) : get a room u 2!

*anonymous went to private room*
*someoneElse didn't and got kicked to the private room*

:) ah ... I can already see the first actionscripts.org wedding !

*comes to his senses*
How is this going to be moderated anyway ?

[20 Ton Squirrel]

Ya know, I hadn't really considered that problem about the Mac not supporting some other scripting stuff. But to be honest, it was my intention to keep this purely between Flash and my engine. The engine can handle all sorts of things, I don't think we'll need any other languages... except maybe PHP and/or XML. And those are just for display purposes.

We can make the client a full, normal browser window or we can do the popup... I personally prefer normal window just because of all the things we're gonna have to stuff into the main window. I would strongly encourage the use of roll-up type menus and such.

I have a few ideas on how we can skin the thing, too, using Maccer's PHP wrapper. But that comes later, dern it.

I agree with Jesse's thought about no size. There is already a command to "act out" called emote or just use the : key.

: puts a pair of gray cordoroy pants on his head.

returns

Grimslayde puts a pair of gray cordoroy pants on his head.

Private rooms are no trouble, either. Again, that's inate on the engine's VR. Rooms, objects, etc are all part of the package. Private chat is no trouble.

We can have the color be an option, too, cuz the engine can either parse it or format it out. That's EASY. Heck, rather than use cookies to store settings we can have the ENGINE take care of that. Heheheh... I rule.

[vilehelm]

Do you think it would be possible to add buttons in for some of the emote type actions? i know that just doing it with the keyboard is quicker but i was thinking for newbies that it would be more intuitive to see buttons that says "think" "do" and "say" (just examples)

the button could just populate the first character of the text field ...???

[pinkaboo]

oh, how about a kind of walk through dictionary/manual that's easier to read than the tute I was looking at when I visited scary Grimslayde? A more colourful user friendly experience.

K

[vilehelm]

Originally posted by pinkaboo
oh, how about a kind of walk through dictionary/manual that's easier to read than the tute I was looking at when I visited scary Grimslayde? A more colourful user friendly experience.

K

ditto, that will be another job that needs doing

[20 Ton Squirrel]

It's a deal-E-o. I'm on it. The tutorial was part of the package as well... didn't much bother with it cuz I was so busy coding new things. I'll have it up here today.

[20 Ton Squirrel]

Oh, and as for the buttons idea Vile:
Sounds fine to me. The buttons should be close by the input box and should have hotkeys so that you don't have to use yer mouse to send. I'm very keyboard-intense, that would be a big pain in the bootie to hafta click a button every time ya wanted to send. Hotkeys might get hairy when dealing with Mac/PC, but I know there are ways around it.

Currently the engine has say, whisper, and I recently coded shout. Say hits every user in the same room, whisper targets a user, and shout hits everyone online. Shouts may NOT be a good idea. *grin*

[vilehelm]

yep yep yep.

the buttons will create the text characters. peeps should eventually make the connection and migrate to the keyboard. it's just that initial jump that i'd like to make easy.

not everyone works in unix command line everyday.

fortunately or unfortunately i'm 34 so i remember the old search machines at the library that required all of that command line stuff. and the old incredible hulk game on my PC XT was much the same, all text based commands, and i still suck as a typist.

[kabezz]

i whised macromedia would buy adobe atmosphere and melt it with flash. that way we could have real cool monsters talk to each other . and for this to be completed there would be a parallel text-base conversion program so the discussion could be retrieved that way.

and i whished no orthodox flasher would reply that it should be melted with director 8.5.