Alpha Build 90 Notes

[trevor]

Ok, been working hard on the command panel. Here's the new stuff:

* Chat Panel UI tweaks
Cleaned up the UI so that it's prettier and less bulky. I like it.

* Support /me emotes
You can now type /me does something and it will show up as:

trevor does something

The idea is that you can describe what you are doing instead of always jus saying what you are doing.

* /alias Aliases
This is the big one, the one that's taken the bulk of the time. I love these. Check it out. It actually includes several commands:

/alias name command
assign a new command. The command be whatever text you want. For example:

/alias wjay /whisper jay Yo man !

Would make it so you type:

/wjay

And it whispers to jay "Yo man !"

Which is ok, but we really need some more fancy stuff, so check this out: {*} is replaced with the rest of the line, and {1}, {2}, ... are replaced with the text at the given index. Let me illustrate:

/alias wjay /whisper jay {*}

Can now be used to:

/wjay Hey man, let's go kill them all !

Will whisper to jay "Hey man, let's go kill them all !"

Another example:

/alias hi /s hi {1}, how are you {2} ?

/hi trevor tonight
Bob says: hi trevor, how are you tonight ?

You can even use quotes to group words together:

/hi "trevor da bomb croft" tonight
Bob says: hi trevor da bomb croft, how are you tonight ?

Or escape quotes:

/hi "trevor \"da bomb\" croft" tonight
Bob says: hi trevor "da bomb" croft, how are you tonight ?

The possibilities are incredible for the GM to preconfigure text and aliases in this way (as a hint, just wait until I get the inline dice rolling, this is gonna rule!)

/savealiases filename
You can optionally provide the filename on the command, if you leave it off it will pop up a file dialog

The file is simple text and can be modified in notepad, or whatever.

/loadaliases filename
You can optionally provide the filename on the command, if you leave it off it will pop up a file dialog

/clearaliases
This removes all aliases from the system

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There you go. Let me know if you run into any weirdness, or have other neat ideas

[Emryys]

This looks really cool with lots of potential...

One thing that might be helpful, is most commands are 1 letter or close so why not make the commands so far...

whisper - /w

say - /s

roll - /r

rollme - /rme

rollGM - /rgm

Help - /h

goto - /g

clear - /clr

emote - /me

alias - /a

Clear aliases -/ca

Load aliases -/la

save aliases -/sa

might make things smoother...

[trevor]

Looking forward, as the number of built in commands increases, the name space will become ambiguous. For example if we make /alias as /a, then later introduce something like /attack, what should be the shortcut ?

We've put in some short cuts, ones that we thought made sense, and we're fully open to reevaluate them if someone has a strong opinion.

The nice thing is that now you can create your own shortcuts:

/alias /a /alias {*}
/alias /w /whisper {*}

and so on

[Emryys]

agreed Although 3 letters is good for the stockmarket and airports, so that may work It can be figured out later if necessary... and like you said, you can make your own

Which leads to...

/savealiases filename
You can optionally provide the filename on the command, if you leave it off it will pop up a file dialog

The file is simple text and can be modified in notepad, or whatever

It's a .txt file? This is good because I'll probably need to edit after I forget what I made

[trevor]

Yup, just a plain old text file

[rkathey]

Very, very, very, very, very nice.

Very easy to use and allows lots of functionality.

Nice touch on the popup menu when you don't give it a file name.

I'm an old VI head so the text file format with the : is perfect.

Once the inline dice roller is up I'll write a perl script to parse the xml from srd and and have /{monstername} translate into attack and damage. So something like /kobold rolls the kobold's attack and damage without having to look it up.

Shall I say it?

Yes, I think I shall.

/me pauses and takes a deep breath

It will be glorious!!!

[trevor]

Super neat ! I guess I'd better get those inline dice rolls in I think I'll do that this afternoon.

Another improvement occured to me this morning. Aliases currently support arguments which can be referred to as {1}, {2} and so on. I'm going to make it so that you can also refer to other aliases. So if you don't specify a number, it will look up the value in the alias table.

That way, for example, if you are setting up your text ahead of time, you could do something like:

/alias room1 The room is big, {leader} has a bad feeling

Then at play time, you would:

/alias leader "Trevor the Axe-or"

Which would lead to:

/room1
The room is big, Trevor the Axe-or has a bad feeling

That way, you can write all your pre-text in a generic way, and only change one alias to update all the text

[Zulithe]

Ideas:

1. color coating, especially for emotes and dice rolls to make them easier to spot. It would also be a further measure to prevent roll cheating, since at the moment, if a sneaky player wanted to be evil, he could just TYPE a fake roll and it isn't possible to see if it is real or not

/me rolls: (2d6+2) => 12

What can I say? I like to make sure all the bases ae covered

2. Possible support for avatars? A player's Token could be scaled down as an avatar

3. make URL's clickable to open in default browser? would be helpful. A lot of people use a service like http://www.sylnae.net/3eprofiler/index.php
to host online character sheets and links for them are frequently shared. Also, links to stuff the DM might want to show the players, like a landscape view hosted on his website, etc.

4. in the "connect to server" box, I notice you can host one at rptools.net. Will it ever be possible that servers hosted there can optionally be set to "public", then people looking for a game can join open games Or DMs can let 3rd parties sit in to view their game. Which also brings up another feature that would be needed: the DM gets the option to "silence" or "voice" each person, kick people out, ban people, etc.

Great work!!

[trevor]

1. color coating, especially for emotes and dice rolls to make them easier to spot. It would also be a further measure to prevent roll cheating, since at the moment, if a sneaky player wanted to be evil, he could just TYPE a fake roll and it isn't possible to see if it is real or not

There is another request to let players determine the color of their messages. The trick would be making emotes and die rolls have a color that they can't force. However, since it's html, they could possibly just set the color to the die color, or something really, really close. We need to brainstorm this one a little more

2. Possible support for avatars? A player's Token could be scaled down as an avatar

I've debated this with the lead designer a couple times, I like the idea. It has a couple complications that need addressing. The most obvious one is which icon to show. If you are using strict token management, and you want to speak as one character, should it show your avatar ? I'm thinking perhaps if you speak as something it uses that token's image as avatar.

3. make URL's clickable to open in default browser? would be helpful. A lot of people use a service like http://www.sylnae.net/3eprofiler/index.php
to host online character sheets and links for them are frequently shared. Also, links to stuff the DM might want to show the players, like a landscape view hosted on his website, etc.

I'll see what I can do about this one. Note that we're looking at making it possible to keep those kinds of things within the context of the campaign and can be "handed out" to the players by the GM.

4. in the "connect to server" box, I notice you can host one at rptools.net. Will it ever be possible that servers hosted there can optionally be set to "public", then people looking for a game can join open games Or DMs can let 3rd parties sit in to view their game. Which also brings up another feature that would be needed: the DM gets the option to "silence" or "voice" each person, kick people out, ban people, etc.

As a point of clarification, the Publish to RPTools doesn't actually run the server on rptools, it just posts the information there so that your friends can look up by server name, and don't have to worry about IP numbers and stuff. There has been some interest in an Observer mode, which I think is cool. And publishing the server list is certainly possible (there's actually a hidden page that does that already). But there are some complications that need addressing first. Let's get past 1.0 then brainstorm this one some more

Great work!!

Thanks !