Chat text aging

[Steelclaw]

So, I'm sitting in Dragon chat and notice that someone said something, so I start to reply... to text thats half an hour old.

Timestamps would be nice, but there's not a lot of space down in that chat window, and I really don't care if someone said something 28 minutes 14 seconds ago -- "a long time ago" would suffice.

How about blending the text color towards the background color as it gets older? This doesn't have to be updated every millisecond (or second) and doesn't need to be a continuous change. Say, 100% opacity for 0-5 mins old, 90% opacity for 5-15 mins, and 70% opacity for 15 mins and older.

Am I the only one who thinks this would be useful?

[awdz]

i've taken to checking the list of folks in the chat to see if the person i'm replying to is still in it. i like the idea of the text aging; i don't like for text to become harder to read, but i'm not sure what kind of opacity or other options would be better than what you suggest.

[Greenclaw1]

While we're talking about chat it would be nice to fix the bug that prevents your custom tabs highlighting when a new text entry for the channels of that tab occurs. For me now non of my tabs highlight to indicate to me something new been said in that tab when I'm viewing another tab. Meaning I have to keep scrolling through my tabs which can lead a delayed response.

[Velea]

Personally, if this were put in, I would hope they would put a toggle to turn it off. I have a hard enough time reading chat in game sometimes without it fading out on me.

I just tend to "clear history" on chat tabs every now and again, though, so that anything that's more than about 15 minutes old isn't there any more. Much less confusing for those times when I've been doing something else, not paying attention to a particular tab, and want to "start fresh".

[Syndic]

I tend to have 1 tab for each chat channel, currently 3, and then a main chat which displays all 3 of those channels, that gives me an idea of timing on things very roughly. Timestamping would be good though.

[Oakleif]

Greenclaw - go to the chat window properties (right click in the window and choose properties in the popup menu) and lower the opacity of the whole window. Around 70% you can see the chat as well as at 100%, but you can also see the flashing tabs easily.

[Kala]

I like time-stamping. I'm not a big fan of chat fade, as sometimes I scroll back up and read it if I've been afk a while. The only problem I can forsee with time-stamps is that all time in game seems to be displayed as server time. I'm not always coherent enough to remember what time it is where the servers are, either. (So-and-so was last on at 17:06? Ok, that's 5pm, do I add 3 hours? 2?) It would be nice if things displayed in local time.

[tramsan]

Hm, well, text fading might hurt your FPS a bit, ya know... I think time stamping ought to do the trick. A simple HH:mm (configurable) ought to be enough, and oughtn't take much doing.

[Steelclaw]

What about prefixing the text with something small to indicate "new" (0-5min), "kinna old" (5-15min) and "ancient" (15+min)?
example:

-[Channel: Name] This is ancient. Forget about it!
.[Channel: Name] This is a little stale, probably still worth responding to.
[Channel: Name] This is fresh! Respond now!

[awdz]

i suspect adding the - and . would add to the fps problem too.
maybe just time stamp with mm would be sufficient?

[tramsan]

That would require mucking about with the whole text history, making it harder to do than timestamps, and besides I just don't like it.

[Kala]

I agree... Just give me some nice and simple timestamps.

[Greenclaw1]

Greenclaw - go to the chat window properties (right click in the window and choose properties in the popup menu) and lower the opacity of the whole window. Around 70% you can see the chat as well as at 100%, but you can also see the flashing tabs easily.

Thanks Oakleif that did the trick!

[Steelclaw]

That would require mucking about with the whole text history, making it harder to do than timestamps, and besides I just don't like it.

That mostly depends on how the text history is stored. If it's an array of lines, the implementation is pretty straightforward. If it's a single string in a buffer, not so easy.

Any client programmers reading?

How about being able to just plain customize the line format using substitutions?

example:
(key)
%am = age, minutes
%a = age, symbolic
%th = timestamp, hour
%tm = timestamp, minute
%n = name of sender
%c = channel
...

Prefix lines with: [%th:%tm] %n:
lines show up like: [14:33] Steelclaw: Yes, this could be neat

Prefix lines with: %c %n:
lines show up like: Channel_name Steelclaw: Or this.

With the exception of figuring out the age, the substitution code should be able to be written as to not impact client performance.

[Vlisson]

the chat logs are with a time stamp so i think this would not be difficult to see ingame too

i would love it, but the chat lenght would increase, maybe add a real new feature:

if you put your mouse icon over the chat line you see the time stamp?

[Royal]

Timestamps would be very nice.
"XXX minutes since" is something I've never seen, and would not find handy. Automatically I'll start calculating when it was said (indeed, the time) so I can connect it to other events.

[Kerech]

Just make it a pref setting, something like "showchattimestamps" and add a timestamp - server time would be fine, once you figure out the offset between yourself and server time it would be easy to watch.

[Radier]

While we're talking about chat it would be nice to fix the bug that prevents your custom tabs highlighting when a new text entry for the channels of that tab occurs. For me now non of my tabs highlight to indicate to me something new been said in that tab when I'm viewing another tab. Meaning I have to keep scrolling through my tabs which can lead a delayed response.

I have had the same issue. A workaround is to change window transparency to 10-20, then the tabs should glow when new text is posted.

[Favoran]

if you put your mouse icon over the chat line you see the time stamp?

The only problem I foresee in that is the game would have to store the time associated with every line of text you receive. Sometimes that wouldn't be much of a problem, and I'm sure that it wouldn't be all that large to save a time tag with a number identifying the lines of text, but after playing the game for any amount of time, you'll have a great deal of lines to keep track of. Especially if you're out hunting or crafting.