So, in a game that's really social, you can't underestimate the power of emotes to immersiveness. Otherwise you have just a chat program with overly customizable avatars and too small of a chat area. There's that whole 'communciation is 70% non-verbal' thing that gets missed.

But I always found it a pain to use emote animations in conversation. Okay... typetypetypetypeEnter. Now type the emote command or keybind to punctuate my statement. By the time I'm done with that - two other chat lines have gone by.

So my suggestion is to allow animation emotes to be triggered by text in your chat line. If I type in: *laugh* that's funny!, then my avvie does the laugh animation and the chat scroll says: Lakem laughs, "that's funny!". Or if I put a ; ) in my text, the avvie should wink and give a thumbs up or something.

I think that this would allow a greater amount of expression in chat with a minimal amount of extra work as well as syncing it up. And it would make interaction seem a lot more real. Plus, modifying how the chat scroll is presented (including the Lakem laughs as part of the same line) make it easier to track emotes to the associated chat text without needing another carriage return. These could be embedded into emote commands too: /me laughs like a crazy person *laugh*

If moods are implemented, it's possible that mood could affect which animation is attached to which trigger. If ya wanted to get fancy, maybe triggers could be customizable, but that's just icing.

This is a great suggestion. I'd like to second it! (It shouldn't be difficult for Cyan to implement.)

Obviously, if you type *luagh* it isn't going to work very well. People will need to spell correctly. But... very cool idea!

_________________

MOULa 26838 | Prologue Video Project: On Hold pending Minkata support
Visit rel.to to explore Myst, Uru, and D'ni communities!

Ah, I never knew that. That does help a lot! Maybe the suggestion should include pointing that out more explicitly in the help?

One thing we could do when the beta gets more public is to start documenting these sorts of things as much as possible before launch.

I know it's the popular thing to do these days, but why not start an Uru wiki? If there's any game that could do with a wiki, it's Uru.

Umm..... ... click here.

_________________
Fiat UrU Vivo

The game There has this implimented. The parser engine looks for keywords and changes your avatar's mood depending on what you say. SO if your avie starts saying things like sad, poor, unhappy, etc...it will cause your avie to start frowning and looking dejected. The opposite for happy text! -)


It also has a 'strength' character ( the ` key) which will show different levels of animated emotes. So a 'happy my just be a small smile while a '''happy will cause you to back flip and dance a jig! But the emotes also depend on your avie's mood...so if you do a '''happy while you have been talking about sad and bad things, you may just get a small smile.

IF you google the keywords There Emotes you should get a good listing of how it works.

Toodles,

NOldor Numbwit
Eternal Newbie

Voice chat in There is highly involved; it takes note of your pitch, tone, volume, etc and animates your avatar accordingly. The only problem using this in URU is that you can’t mix and match animations like you can in There, because (as far as I can tell) an URU avitar is all one object, while a There avitar is made up of 4 sections that are bound to a center point.

For example: in There, the Jig dance animation will take control all sections of the avatar (head, torso, arms, legs) while it animates; the Cheer animation only takes control of the head, torso and arms. If you activate a Cheer while a jig is already in progress, it will only interrupt the head, torso, and arms sections of the avitar while the legs continue to do a jig.

There also has a much better chat system in general, but the way its implemented there would not work very well in URU...I'll Sketch up some redesigned KI interfaces and get back to you guys, I've just had an idea

_________________
StarLion
The Meeting Place Hood

It is a very good idea in general. I find the system realised in Entropia the most convenient.
It recognises basic key words like "lol", " :)"and "bye" etc. instantly animating it and has an action panel with buttons for other available animations that player can assign to a hot key or click on a panel itself.

Edited: ha-ha :/ I can disable smilies here. But have you played Entropia?
Avatars DO smile there. And shrug. And dance. And do a great many other things.
BUT! In places where more than 2-3 ppl present lag is HUGE. Does not stop them from coming and spending loads of real money though ;D

Last edited by Eliste on Sun Jun 18, 2006 10:14 pm; edited 1 time in total

Eliste wrote:

It recognises basic key words like "lol", " "and "bye" etc.

Like this board then

RR_Caz wrote:

Umm..... ... click here.

That's a wiki entry about Uru. Not an actually wiki for documenting how things work in Uru. It sounds like it could be very useful, once it hits Live (or something for Cyan to consider starting in the beta test). I know I've seen one D'ni themed Wiki on Wikia, but it doesn't have much on it. Plus, I suspect you'd have to probably get Cyan's okay on it, as it would contain information about their intellectual property.