Dev Blog 3/29/17 - Friends list and advanced chatbox

[Kibbelz]

Friends list and advanced chatbox

March 3rd 2017

 

News and Updates

Its been a while since we've done a dev blog since mostly we've been working on a lot of minor quality of life chages here and there alongside major code refactoring but we have some features i've been working on worthy enough of a dev blog! We felt that the current chat was too basic for Intersect and decided to bring it up to the same level of other chatbox's similar to other engines out there. In this update (included in beta 4.0) we will now have the following chat channels:

 

• No channel: Local chat. Only players on your current map or in the surrounding 8 maps can hear your message. Also has a cute chat bubble in game!
• /all & /global: The global game chat where anyone can listen anywhere in your world
• /announcement: Another global message just in a different in chat to stand out which only admins can use.
• /admin: A private admin chat that only admins can message and read. Can't have any players hearing our super secret plans right? :^)
• /party: A private party only what where you can message other party members.
• /pm & /message: A private message between you and the members name following the command. Example: /pm Kibbelz hi how are you?
• /reply & /r: Once you have initiated conversation with someone in a private message you don't want to type out /pm name_here every time do you? A short hand way to just message the player you were talking to previously again!
   

Examples of these chat channels can be seen in the screenshot below:

Spoiler

 

• Event Driven Commands: Yes you heard right, common events can now be triggered by custom /commands as shown in the screenshots below

Spoiler

 

And in game "/welcome kibbbelz" becomes:

We also now have a new command in the text display function within the event editor. I suggest you read up about it in the updated thread here

 

Friends List

We all know starting a project with a small community can be tough, but what keeps people coming back aside from your good content is the community. We decided to help give more players the chance to interact more with one another with a friends list! It can be accessed on the main HUD at the bottom right of the intersect client. You can add friends by searching for them in the textbox and remove them by right clicking them on your friends list. Friends are filtered by being offline or online including what map they're on! Look at the screenshots below for a general feel :

 

Spoiler

Friends list basic GUI display:

 

Friends request:

 

Remove a friend:

 

Whats next?

Make sure to check out the Intersect Road Map as for what features we have next planned in line! We will continue tieing loose ends, fixing bugs and refactoring some code. Last stretch guys, we're nearly there!

 

As always, feel free to post comments and questions below! We are excited to hear your thoughts on our progress!

 

-The Intersect Development Team

[Phenomenal]

Sounds awesome, my only question is whether or not we will get a /players command or some kind of way to check who is online.

[Kibbelz]

Just now, PhenomenalDev said:

Sounds awesome, my only question is whether or not we will get a /players command or some kind of way to check who is online.

With this update you can make a custom event command called e.g. /online and then simply send a player message with the \onlinelist and \onlinecount commands in the event editor. See here

[Aesthetic]

Will this give you the ability to pull Variables? Such as /Cookies (/pn has /param (cookie variable) cookies!) = Player has 3 cookies!

[Kibbelz]

27 minutes ago, NotAzizele said:

Will this give you the ability to pull Variables? Such as /Cookies (/pn has /param (cookie variable) cookies!) = Player has 3 cookies!

We are looking into it

[Chronos]

Any chance we'll see chat tabs with configurable channels on them? Or is that something we'll need to do ourselves?

[Rory]

Amazing, Kibbelz  

[panda]

1 hour ago, Chronos said:

Any chance we'll see chat tabs with configurable channels on them? Or is that something we'll need to do ourselves?

I suggested this (and want it), but as you might imagine this is... rather low on the list of priorities.

[Kibbelz]

Panda summarized it up in one. We may go back to it @Chronos but at least for now we have bigger priorities elsewhere. Also i forgot to mention my double clicking on a friend in the friends list it adds "/pm friend_name " in the chat for you  

[Refur]

Amazing job, I was waiting for something like this, the friend list is a real plus.
 

[Giligis]

That's awesome, the /command trigger. Such a good idea. 

[MiniGrief]

Would the text next to the person's name (Aka the map they are on) be able to be turned off or at least have some kind of alias for the friends list as I can imagine some people not wanting many maps called the same thing for a big area.