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Radials for communication


Dreamstar

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Many of the growing community here have been talking and thinking about how to communicate with our teams quickly.

The idea of voicechat is great, but complicated.

 

Not yet knowing how groups may or may not work makes it difficult to formulate this concept. Either way, If there was an option to hold down a button, maybe the letter T on the keyboard, causing a radial menu to appear at the mouse with a few options that you pick to put on the radial hotbar.

 

The functionality could be altered in several ways, depending on whats realistic to implement into the game.

  • Spatial chat only
  • Party chat, (i.e. 5 man group)
  • Raid chat
  • Prompt pre-recorded voice the developers put in to speak.

Just an example : Jim the Industrialist/ Builder repair man is down in the guts of the ship trying to fix parts as everything is blowing up.

He might be in a random pick up group. or with friends. Maybe their Teamspeak server went down. Everything is going bad. He pushes T and mouses over "Reactor Critical" and clicks. In his group chat an automated message shows up -Reactor Critical, Abandon ship!" which could or not prompt a voice command to the group with a similar message.

Jim also usually joins group as a repairman, so he set his hotbar up to include messages related to ship parts, Engines Down, Hyperdrive Down, Reactor Critical, et cetera.

 

Allowing players to put in their own text is a double edged sword I would personally stay away from.

Would likely need input delays / cooldown timers to prevent abuse / spam.

A possible advantage of a system like this, is that with a single game world, I believe there will be many Players, French most likely, Germans, Americans, Russians, Japanese, and so forth; Messages could be written in many languages so if a silly american like me can only talk like a baby in french, at the very least I will click Reactor Critical and it could show R?acteur Critique for the person with French set at their primary language.

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When reading this, I instantly thought of a game called Smite and its voice commands.

http://smite.wikia.com/wiki/Voice_Commands

On the wiki you can see phrases adjacent to letters such as V, VA, VAA and so on. You press the keys for whatever you're trying to communicate without having to type it out. It's a genius idea and saves a lot of time when communicating.

 

As a player of that game and having used the commands myself, I've actually memorized most of the list and have no trouble thinking of which keys to press for what I want to say. The DU team can pre-record messages and have a system just like this. It will be even better with translations if you can't understand the other person, minimizing the language barrier.

 

I can't believe I haven't thought of this in my voice communication post!

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That is also reminds me of the game "Tribes: Accend"

 

It uses the same mechanic to quickly cast a recorded voice command to the team: Such as "Capture Point A" - "Protecting Point A" - "Infiltrating Enemy Base" - "Requesting Backup" etc

 

Yeah, that would make a good addition to that thread Astrov...

 

Good Idea there Saffi...

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So it would be, in effect, a quick chat of sorts. Quintet has this sort of thing in its chat box, a "Quick Chat" button next to the text input field with preset commands for every role. I find it really useful and I imagine it would be in DU as well.

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What if it didn't have to be the developers voice. I know that by allowing people to record there own it does bring up the issue again if they will keep them reasonably appropriate. You could only have these recorded messages play to friends  of the person cutting down on the amount of unreasonable voice recordings that people would do. Or you could try something where it just reads off whatever you type to your crew but I can't see that being of much use. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I like this. But i think it should be a chat system implemented itself for all users like a global chat.

I'm not entirely sure that I understood you fully jbonez, but I imagine there would also be a global chat, or planetary chat, as well, but that would be incredibly inconvenient and chaotic for communicating just between your team, squad, group. The radial comm menu would be a solution to that. 

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Indeed, this would be an extra tool for communicating. While we could always type things out in the chat box. Assuming it will be "global" and allow for communication anywhere in the universe - I think it will be because of either the nano former or some kind of holographic eye implants that are our "Heads up Display" (HUD)/ User Interface.

But to have an extra system, like in tribes ascend where you could push VGTG
and a voice would say "I am the greatest", and auto type the same thing to your team using your name.
VAB - attack the enemy base
VAF - attack the enemy flag
VDB - defend our base, and so forth with these commands

They were always initiated by hitting the V key and then the subsequent keys. They werent particularily hard to learn if you were dedicated.

 

I suggest that there be Radial menu's for many parts of gameplay. Instead of getting a list of actions like in eve, there could be Seperate action keys. Like if you push V you get a radial menu for voice commands.

If you push C you get a menu for interactive commands. like opening a container, getting into a command chair, flight seat, getting info on an object.

I surmise there would be a customizeable 'bar' in the options, by default the 9 possible options around the radial being set to 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, but you could change the keybinds specifically to V-E-B .so instead of hitting V, 1, 1, for Voice, Engine, Broken.

 

They could either trust the community, or put the voice commands on a sequence, like {1.) What is it, 2.) Whats wrong with it}. and put things in the category so you cant say whats wrong before what it is. (2)Broken (1)Engine=(NO) versus (1)Engine (2)Broken=(YES)

looking something like:
V - 1 - 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
V - 2 - 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and so forth

 

But of course, this is a fairly robust suggestion and would require a significant ammount of work by the devs. I would like to see it but I understand its not priority, Mostly this is here so that if they are asking for options at the office they can also say, well what does the community think. I also have no doubt we will see a standard chat system

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  • 4 weeks later...

Another part of the chat, something i really loved about anarchy online, even tho it was playercreated, were chatbots. I dont know if anyone here played AO and remembers fixercom or guildbots, but they were playermade accounts which could answer questions and had basic database functions as well as some other little more or less usefull functions like random number generators, information about other players etc.

 

It would be really great to have something like this as kind of rudimentary AI (even tho its obviously not an ai)

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