Veggiesama wrote:MOTE BETA BUILD #11 wrote:The new chat interface prompted us to change how things are done with regard to the chat interface. First, the old message panel is now reserved for macro output and application generated messages. ... Secondly, this change effectively separates actual conversations from program output, lessening visual clutter.
Oh man, I've been wanting this for years.
Though it's not clear how it interacts with the impersonation system. I've always wanted a separate channel for impersonated conversation and description to go to (IC) and another channel for die-rolls, player chatter, and miscellaneous messages (OOC). I'm not sure using IRC, with a limited nickname selection and lack of HTML formatting, will accomplish that.
So far features are very limited. Here is my analysis, based on testing this morning:
PROs
-- less clutter in the chat (theorically, see CONs), only macro output is going through chat
-- separate channels via IRC: if you select a token and hit enter, a new IRC channel opens as a tab with the owner of the token, so you can "whisper" back and forth with that player fairly easily. Pretty neat if you want individual chats (one for each player). Being connected on my own, I couldn't test if you could select several tokens and open a channel including all the players owning these tokens (quick multi-whisper method I guess). That would need to be tested live, but is promising.
CONs
-- The input box in the chat panel is GONE. You cannot send text there manually if you want to. That's a bummer imo.
-- The IRC panel and the hat panel share the same space and you cannot see both at the same time, so you have to toggle with a button between the two depending if you want to chat with players or see what's in the chat. It would be nice to have both of them on different panels, so you can have them side by side if you want to. Same for individual IRC channels, going from tab to tab could be cumbersome for some GMs.
-- The input field for the IRC panel is floating and sometimes hard to recover (it likes to play hide an seek). it canot be docked or resized, and is generally on top of something else.
-- The input field for the IRC panel also has NO color option, no scrolling toggle, and does not show if you are impersonating a token (so currently, as of beta 11, there is no way to know if you are impersonating a token, and I'm not sure impersonating a token actually works anymore.
-- When displayed, the IRC channel inputs appear in bubbles,with the name of the alias next to it and the date. I prefer the old Maptool formatting in the chat, but that's me.
-- Currently, IRC dialogs (when someone connects/disconnects, etc... from irc.darmyst.org all goes to the "old" chat window, which kinda defeats the purpose of removing the clutter (the info displayed has nothing to do with my game).
Here is a screenshot of the new IRC chat, with the input field on the right: