Curious About Local/"Say" Chat Range..

[Raptress]

Is there any way, any file that can be altered to increase the range at which one can see /say messages? The current range is something like 30 or 40 (It doesn't seem to be constant somehow), and especially with Ancient dragons about, this just isn't enough sometimes.

I've looked through every file I can think of that might have such a setting to no avail. Did I miss something or is this dictated by the client in a manner that I can't alter?

[AmonGwareth]

Is there any way, any file that can be altered to increase the range at which one can see /say messages? The current range is something like 30 or 40 (It doesn't seem to be constant somehow), and especially with Ancient dragons about, this just isn't enough sometimes.

I've looked through every file I can think of that might have such a setting to no avail. Did I miss something or is this dictated by the client in a manner that I can't alter?

Its dictated by the server so you cannot change it.

[Veruliyam]

Is the range too restricting or too open?

Because there is the /shout command.

[Raptress]

Its dictated by the server so you cannot change it.

Darn. Oh well. Thanks for the reply anyway. :3

Veruliyam: It becomes restricting when you're on a roleplay server and you need to have your character sit within a rather tight range in order to hear multiple people, yet still remain in-character and not sit on top of anyone else, or sit in weird spot, etc. And therein lies the problem with shout as well: my problems concern RP, and if I use shout, it's going to be taken as if I'm actually shouting. :P

[Veruliyam]

Ah. I see.

Khutit form!

Or, you will all have to get all huggy.

[Steelclaw]

I'm not making any promises about getting the range of /say adjusted, but what's a more reasonable value?

Keep in mind that the upper bound is somewhere around the load distance (minimum distance at which characters are first displayed and become selectable). Getting your message out there is one thing, however getting a /say from some invisible character is something we should probably avoid.

[Raptress]

Keep in mind that the upper bound is somewhere around the load distance (minimum distance at which characters are first displayed and become selectable).

Really? Does that character-load range vary depending on view distance? My view distance is about half, and I think I can see people up to maybe 70 or so units away, but I only seem to be able to reliably hear people within 30 units. Sometimes I can hear up to 40 and I don't understand why that varies. I think I'd be happy with somewhere around 50, though someone else I've talked to would like to see 60. I'm not sure if that's getting too far for the "invisible /say chat" problem though.

[Frith-Rae]

Yea I have wondered how all this works; the most recent example for me being those Roundtable Council meetings over in Dralk and how dragons on the other side of the circle couldn't hear /say.

Does it matter if you are hatchling vs. ancient? It *appears* to in game but that may be just cuz I'm more exposed to ancients than hatchlings.

But it seems like something is off when if you stand on the "dragon imprinted circle" in any Great Hall (that is what that is in dralk right? A grand hall?) and even though the circle isnt' that big - you can't hear /say from people on the other side.

You also can't stand at one end of the circle and speak to someone standing on top of the platform leading down to the circle. Something that appears to be very much within voice range, but they do not hear your /say...

Its amazing how short that distance is. And if you've got 8 or 9 dragons sitting in a circle, that's about how you have to space yourselves without being on top of one another - literally...

[Raptress]

Talking in a lair in general is rather.. dodgy at best. I've seen situations where one person is standing right next to another person, but they can't hear each other because the two are in different corridor pieces, and yet I've been able to hear /say and emotes from the chamber one floor above where I was. Not an easy one to figure out. x3

[Steelclaw]

Well, according to the server, the threshold for /say is 40m in 3-d space (as opposed to just XY coords).

Testing has shown that this is true provided that you and the speaker are on the terrain and the vertical angle between you and the speaker is close to 0 degrees or 90. All bets are off when the angle approaches 45 degrees, or one or both of you are in a lair chamber.

This requires further investigation.

Out of curiosity, how often do you (anyone who wants to reply) use /say? I mostly use one of the chat channels and /tell to communicate, even if we're close together. If you don't use /say much at all for close communication, why not?

Also, /shout will be heard as long as the listener can /select the shouter.

[LOVWYRM]

we use "say" regulary and often- which means whenever we are ingame, for different reasons. But we use it only for face to face conversation, and often to talk with friends or group members who do not speak that good English.
Helps in combat, if the group is multi- lingual
(English, Belgium, Dutch, France, German), because we all try to speak English only in the chats.

[C`gan]

I use it quite often, particularly when meeting with someone for trading or greetings at portals or anywhere I run into someone.

Also a few times where saying something to wolves gets them to go away. B^>

[Raptress]

Out of curiosity, how often do you (anyone who wants to reply) use /say? I mostly use one of the chat channels and /tell to communicate, even if we're close together. If you don't use /say much at all for close communication, why not?

On Order, many of us roleplayers do face-to-face RP for various reasons and this involves both /say and emote (if that has a /say-like range). Most of the time that I start having problems with /say range is in New Trismus, a popular gathering spot for random RP. There'll be times I can hear what the person I'm talking to is saying, and then they respond to someone else that I cannot hear, etc.

Using /say in NT makes the RP "public" so to speak. Anyone who's in town will be able to see it, unlike /tells or channels, and they can join in at their leisure if they wish.

Maybe if we all made a concerted effort to use /shout to the point where everyone understands that it is not, in fact, shouting, that could work. It's still kind of immersion-breaky though.. and if we do everything in /shout, well.. reading a huge block of all the same color without the bracketed names in channels gets.. interesting. xD

[Akrion]

Out of curiosity, how often do you (anyone who wants to reply) use /say? I mostly use one of the chat channels and /tell to communicate, even if we're close together. If you don't use /say much at all for close communication, why not?

Also, /shout will be heard as long as the listener can /select the shouter.

Order uses /say and /em very often. It's true when people are talking out of character it might not be used very much, but with Order being a roleplay shard, people use it all the time. I couldn't say how often Chaos or Blight would use it, but I can say that Order would absolutely love to see a chat range of 60someodd meters at least.

For example of people roleplaying locally in New Trismus currently: If a Dragon is sitting atop the vault building and another Dragon is sitting atop the gazebo, they won't hear eachother. If someone is standing atop the building adjacent to the vault building, they can't hear someone standing next to the craft building (Directly across from the vault).

The ability for roleplayers to hear people around the entirety of the New Trismus square would simply be amazing.

[Dracaena]

The say range is a bit short as it is. I was invited to a dragon bonding some time back. The guests were given directions for where the seating area was to be from the couple and the one performing the bonding ceremony. I took a seat at the back as I only casually knew the couple. I waited quite some time before asking ooc if the ceremony was about to start. Turned out it was nearly over and I hadn't heard a word of it. Was disappointing. Why I recommend gatherings for events like that to create a channel, which is what I did with my ascension party.


Dracaena

[Frith-Rae]

Yes that was often a problem we had to troubleshoot for at events. We'd have to remember to position the "speaker area" and then keep talking trying to direct everyone "watching" to make sure they were within /say distance. Usually involved either /shout "DID YOU HEAR HIM TALKING? IF NOT MOVE CLOSER" or having everyone joining a group to have ooc conversation to coordinate this (or a chatroom).

But then the RP was in /say - the gruop or chatroom if necessary was only for OOC coordination.

But yes on Order, /say is used often.

[Steelclaw]

I'm getting the impression that for the most part, the current 40m range of /say is usable for almost all cases -- after all, this appears to be the first time any sort of complaint came up. That being said, there are some use cases where it does fall short -- gatherings and encounters that are not intimately close.

Bumping the /say radius to some higher value, likewise has some negative impacts on immersion. It's certainly immersion-breaking to carry on a conversation "in person" from <some higher value> meters away as if the conversation were face-to-face -- being able to do so detracts from the value of geographic proximity and makes /say almost no different than a normal global chat. Besides, increasing the radius doesn't address the core of the issue and isn't a long-term fix as the moment the gathering becomes large enough, we'll be back at the same problem -- those in the back still get lost.

The problem, as I'm starting to understand from the feedback, seems to be a lack of any sort of soft fall-off, rather than too small of a range. If you're outside of some arbitrary radius from a character, you have absolutely no indication that said character is talking -- even if you can see them. That can certainly ruin events as described, and the workarounds to ensure that everyone present can hear is pretty immersion-breaking.

In real life, other than body language, there's a fall-off that allows people to self-adjust their proximity to the speaker -- the intelligibility of the speaker as heard by the listener. If the listener is too far away, they can still hear the speaker, but can't understand what the speaker is saying as the nuances of speech are lost to the distance. That factor isn't present in Istaria -- you either get 100% of the conversation or 0%.

So, having identified a problem and a goal (to implement a distance-related fall-off for /say), there remain the following questions:
1) What is the expected player experience in the fall-off radius?
2) Is changing the all-or-nothing mechanics of /say a good idea? (This is where you say "No, don't do it because ______!")

Note that this is all speculation at this point -- we're just brainstorming in this thread. There are no plans to make any changes to /say (other than tracking down the radius variability).

A few initial requirements about the experience:
- Intelligibility of the message must rapidly drop off at the current cutoff threshold. This is to prevent breaking immersion by effectively increasing the threshold.
- The degraded message must not convey a different meaning or 'tone' of the original. Dropping words or letters can drastically change the meaning of a message.
- The degraded message must not look like a server error or typo.
- A character within /shout distance /should/ receive some sort of indication that a message was said, even if it is totally unintelligible.

My initial thought is to try blurring text or inserting pixel noise as distance increases. (No idea if this is actually possible without massive re-coding!) Another possibility is sending generic feedback when the listener is out of /say range but still in /shout range -- something like "You hear a faint voice upon the wind...". Partially rejected ideas include replacing characters on the server side with filler like "." or "_", and truncation of the original message.

Ideas? Thoughts?

Remember, this is just brainstorming and there's no commitment nor promise to take action on any of the outcomes.

[SentientSeeker]

Would it be possible to gradually decrease the size of the font as the range increased?

Sent

[Akrion]

I've actually had /say in mind since around May 2009, I've just never made a post about it because until recently I just kinda gave up posting in these forums.

There are various things I can think of that you could do, all of which provide their own problems. I've put together a short list of ideas for you:

=== Ideas ===
1: Scramble) You could gradually scramble letters, so instead of just dropping words you scramble them the further away someone is.

- Pros) You don't drop words and change the feeling/meaning of a post because the word count is still there, and people would know that something should be there.

- Cons) When the effect is slight, it would simply seem like a bunch of crazy typos.
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2: Fade) The /say text could start out white and gradually darken to black or increase in transparency until it is invisible.

- Pros) You don't drop words and change the feeling/meaning of a post, you don't encounter the 'typo' problem of the Scramble solution. High-lighting text won't work either because you simply can't do it.

- Cons) This can be worked around from a very transparent window with something behind it unless text transparency is used. It may also annoy people who already struggle to read computer screen text.
------------------
3: Text Size) Like what Sentient Seeker had already suggested, decrease the size of the text as people move further away.

- Pros) Has the same pros as the previous 2 without most of the cons.

- Cons) Effectiveness would change based on screen size, resolution, and player chosen text size. People who already might struggle to read computer screen text could simply find this annoying.
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4: Don't change /say range) Instead of changing /say, keep it as-is and increase the emote range. Many roleplayers use /em to mix speech with actions, and perhaps a compromise could be made that way. A compromise for the roleplayers in that /say is kept to how you feel it should make sense, Steel, and a compromise for the devs in knowing that /em isn't always used for actions but speech as well.

- Pros) /em and the emote bar aren't used very often by people simply talking to one another. This way /say can be kept to a more logical distance and roleplayers can still have a way to range out to people that isn't /shout. It also has the pros of the previous 3 without any of the cons.

- Cons) /em and the emote bar, when used to mix actions with speech, will break the mentality behind the /say range. This is where the compromise on your side would have to come in.
=============

Anyway, some food for thought. I'll try to consider more options and post them here for you if/when I come up with them.

[Khetienn]

I don't tend to use /Say very much, but I would definitely appreciate some sort of visual cue to let me know that people were talking near me/at me.

Right now, all I can think of for suggestions would be along the lines of an emote: a string of text offering a clue. Something like, "...You hear a vague murmur of conversation nearby..." or "...You can almost hear what is being said around you...".

Possibly vary the text based on distance? *grins* Even something as simple as "You see people talking, but cannot hear them." would work, for me anyway.

I'm not sure how well this would be implemented, and I do like Akrion's ideas for extending the emote range.

Just my 2c.