15 Dec, 2013, ryanhamshire wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
We've added the basic social feature set to Tohm. Please tell us what you think of our design choices! How can we make this part of our game even better?

Demo Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGtqmedQa...

Read more here: http://tohm.wikia.com/wiki/Basic_Social_...

Key points:
- Say and whisper, no tell.
- Freeform emote and targeted emotes.
- Basic grammar correction.
- We're considering add a yell command, please share your opinions?
- We may add eavesdropping and sending private messages far away, based on hero skills.
- How can we streamline all of this to make it easier and faster? We want to do everything we can to get players socializing.

All criticisms and suggestions are very much appreciated. Thank you!
15 Dec, 2013, Hades_Kane wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
For what it's worth, with our yell command… I took a track code snippet and modified that to be what the distance on our yell command reached. I didn't like a yell command that was basically an area echo, so if you are outside of a specified range from where the yell originated, you don't hear it. Yell also doesn't go past closed doors and such either.

Something to consider if you add one in.
16 Dec, 2013, KaVir wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
Say, whisper and yell are fairly standard commands. Removing 'tell' won't stop people spamming, but it'll certainly make it more difficult for newbies to get help, and for roleplayers to find other people to interact with, particularly as there appears to be no global channel either. That's definitely not the route I'd recommend if you're trying to do everything you can to get people socialising. If you're worried about spam, add features to deal with spam, don't just block communication.

What you call "freeform emotes" and "targeted emotes" are usually referred to as "emotes" and "socials", and once again they're standard old-school features. Usually when people talk about targeted emotes they mean something like this.

You mentioned grammar correction, but from what I could see it just appears to add capitalisation and punctuation. Do you actually change the grammar as well?
16 Dec, 2013, quixadhal wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
Actually, the distinction between the term "emote" and "social" is a Dikuism. Other games don't distinguish between them at all. Even my old Diku doesn't make any distinction.

For example…

> smile
You smile.
Quixadhal smiles.

> smile like a fool.
You smile like a fool.
Quixadhal smiles like a fool.

>smile KaVir
You smile at KaVir.
Quixadhal smiles at KaVir.

>emote smiles like a fool at the people posting on some forum.
Quixadhal smiles like a fool at the people posting on some forum.
16 Dec, 2013, KaVir wrote in the 5th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
Actually, the distinction between the term "emote" and "social" is a Dikuism. Other games don't distinguish between them at all.

Yes, and I'm talking about his implementation. What he's referring to as "freeform emote" appears to be identical to the Diku "emote" command, while his "targeted emote" appears to be identical to a Diku social.

Other codebases handle it differently, but he's asked for feedback about his current design choices, and in this case we've got a couple of features that are already well-established. If he knows the terms to look for, he should be able to find plenty of discussions about them.
16 Dec, 2013, ryanhamshire wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
@Hades

Will do. I'm thinking reach one or two rooms away at best. Currently we don't have doors, but will keep that in mind. :)

@KaVir

Yep, I'll put TELL back in, at least for now. My intent was to encourage players to actually meet and "talk" out loud rather than sit separately and silently beam thoughts at each other (it makes the player seem nonresponsive or AFK to passerby). However I see there's fixing that problem, since there are MANY channels outside of the game I can't control. I used to play DragonRealms which lacked a TELL and I didn't dislike that about it, but I do remember having to go outside the game to rendezvous with in-game friends. It's silly to half-fix a problem when it creates another one, so I'll rethink.

No, punctuation only. I might relabel, thanks for the correction.

Thanks for the terminology lesson. I'm mostly interested in the wider discussion - pros and cons of alternative approaches to delivering a social framework, more than whether or not my implementation of this option seems correct. The emotes alternative approach you linked was helpful, as was the open-ended smile example from Quix. Are these your favorite variations on this feature area? Someone in another forum asked if we might add something like "sit in chair" where the chair must be a registered target-able object in the room, so that the action text comes out something like "KaVir takes a seat in a high-backed chair."
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