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