Chat language toggles

[Benz72]

I was wondering about the feasibility of a function:

Whenever anyone chats they can only be speaking in one language at a time (normally their default language). To emulate cross linguistic roleplay would it be possible to have 'language filters' that are toggled in each token?

What I envision is that each token has a list of checkboxes for each language present in the game. At the most basic it would be "speaks" "does not speak" and then have each chat post come out in one of those languages. The filter would garble up the quoted text inside the chat post so that only those PCs who understand the language can read it.

A more finely graded filter could have a 'semi-fluent' state that only garbled some of the words.

The inspiration for this comes from NetHack where you can read the things written in the dust, but as you walk over the message it becomes more and more garbled.

Any thoughts?

[wolph42]

you could set this up in a macro, though slightly tricky...
- create a macro where someone enters text in a certain language (choose with radiobuttons)
- save the output in a property on a lib:token as a json object with {"Language":"Zimbabwe","Message":"do you speak Zimbabwes?"}
- send a macrolink to the chat that executes a macro that retrieves the message from the lib token and checks if the 'clicker' has the language and if so depicts the message. If not:
+send message to chat: you don't understand what is said, or
+scramble the output

You could also first code the message then store it and then decode it when clicked upon, but that would also be unnecessarily cumbersome.

ofcourse if two people at once start using this than the first message will be overwritten by the second, so need to think of a proper way of handling this.

[Benz72]

THank You

I was hoping someone might think the funciton worth coding into 1.4 as an option (default being that all tokens speak 'common' all the time)

The GM should be able to see everything that is written.

Is it possible to have colored/italicized textdisplayed to the GM based on the language being used? (e.g. everybody who is speaking in Russian gets red italics, but the German speakers all get green).

[whited]

I had been thinking of this too, although my idea didn't include garbling the text.

- When you impersonate a token, you get a drop-down box for the languages that the token knows. When you type chat text, it would be flagged with the language selected (eg: select elven and type "hello")
- Everyone else would see either the text prepended with "(in Elven)", or a message stating that "* <name> says something in Elven"
- What everyone saw would depend on what token they were currently impersonating. If they are not impersonating, they would see "Common" only
- The GM of course would always see the text, regardless of impersonated token.

This would require adding the concept of languages to the impersonation feature, and to the token properties - I have no idea how much work this would be.

[CoveredInFish]

Instead of having this implemented hardwired i'd much more like to see some more "events" that we could hook in our macros. With some "onChatReceive" event we could do all this entirely in macro (and so tweak it to our needs).

And think of the zilion ways to go here. I might want do do some language skill test before revealing the message (keep in my mind how many ways are there to do *that*). I might want to partially/complete/not scramble messages. I probably have different sets of languages than you. I might want to differentiate between written and heard languages.

Given macro execution speed might be slower than a hardcoded solution.

[Azhrei]

<slightly-offtopic>
We are currently envisioning a "global event distribution" system for 1.4 in which any module of the application would be able to generate events. The (currently unwritten) timer module could generate clock events, the token management module could generate token movement events, even the form display module could generate "page displayed" events... It's certainly conceivable that there could be events generated by the chat module as well.

Whether it makes sense to turn these into macro calls is a separate question. I think many of them would be internal-use-only initially until we completely understand the ramifications of making them available to macros.
</slightly-offtopic>

[whited]

Event hooks do sound like a better way to go. Perhaps some simple sensible default behavior, and allow for overrides to be done by campaign scripts

[wolph42]

Which would still mean that you have to programche functionality yourself (on topic) which i personally prefer as It Will give more freedom in customisability.

If I only look at Johns ontokenmove and what you can do with that alone gives a good indication of the countless possibilities