Dedicated new & improved (?) KI thread.

[J'Kla]

I have a couple of things to throw into the mix here but before I start I like the mockup Grogyan.

I hate to keep going back to UU but it's a pretty good frame of reference. We had a tool that ran on your desk top that allowed you to see who was on what shard re-buddies. This was kind of useful when it came to deciding where you were going to go first.

One of the other things we discussed was a surface KI. I reckon that's buildable now. A KI that Uru fans could use on the surface from current desktops and with suitable planning and documentation It should be viable to stitch it onto our open source Uru when it becomes available.

There are a couple of models already out there GoMA chat for one and if there was ever one to modify it's the beast. There's also consideration for differently abeled (I dislike disabled personal reasons) players who sometimes used voice both online and off. Here the Teamspeak model always worked with such a minimalist overhead that players would quite often keep it open in a second window.

Do we model surface to cavern communications so that surface to cavern is one to one that would encourage players who wanted group conversation to go into game but at the same time allow someone on the surface to say "Hang on I'm on my way in" Something previously you couldn't say till you hit relto. Occasionaly just too late and very annoying.

The current model has AgeChat, BuddyChat, NeighbourhoodChat and PrivateChat. We always discussed having an option where you could group buddies there was always the ignore option but it was across the board an addition of SurfaceChat could tie in with this Surface KI that was disabled when you entered the cavern.

So your KI was either in Surface mode or Cavern mode but not both.

I was a member of the TMP hood we held regular Sunday meetings (some still do on "There") One of the things we did was split into teams and play an online team version of Trivial Pursuit a TeamChat option and Quizmaster option would have helped with some way of displaying the score. But to be honest some of the cross chat did make for interesting miss direction. lol

There was also a problem with being unaware that a player was in a private conversation one way that came from the "There" model was the headset that let you know who was in voice mode. One way we also talked about was an Avatar KI glow in particular colours this could be tied to your on-screen text different colours for Surface, Age Buddy or Private. At least you would know if an avatar appeared silent but was on a private chat that they just were busy and not ignoring you.

Another issue we had was mainly from what can only be seen as childish behaviour we sometimes saw when we were running our Trivial Pursuit on TMP we did on a couple of occasions have a player who thought it was clever to jump on and around the question master. It would have been nice to have an ignore option let's call it shun that not only silenced the chat but made the Avatar invisible if this was two way it would have made such behaviour pointless. By two way I mean that not only would the player not be able to see the person they had shunned but the shunned would no longer see or hear the the person who shunned them.

I would however say that such an option would be best if the person it was being done to ie the person being shunned was aware of the action and that it stayed in place for only 24 hours this would allow local action to deal with inappropriate behaviour without the need to call on ResEng or Admin action.

I am not altogether certain again if this belongs in this thread but it has given me the opportunity to at least float the idea somewhere.

[Tyion]

It needs a bit more Myst feel.

Its a rough example, Myst like would be having the layer in front of the chat window but behind the text it self would be holographic static

Yeah, lol kind of a stupid comment I made.

[Trylon]

I think the KI should also display the time of day on the KI itself, or the minimized state in any case.

Edit: And how about changing the Carver time from MST/MDT to UTC?
I think that would make timezone calculations a lot easier (And IC we always link into the cavern anyway - and even with day/night cycle MST wouldn't quite cover the 30 hr cycle anyways.)

[J'Kla]

Somebody once did a Myst clock face that was divided in to three day sections and two night with a single hand. I have been considering building one based on an old pendulum clock. The advantage is changing the weight or length of the pendulum you can change the clock speed something that's difficult with an electronic movement.

Changing the face is the easy bit. There was also that clock that was devised for figuring out the appearances in the four pod worlds it would be nice to find a way to embed that into the KI. Possibly linked in with some manual synchronisation to make it a puzzle in it's own right.

There was also talk of reviving the journal entry stuff allowing players to have a journal that would allow players to post stuff from their KI to a book in their relto and have the ability to pass the same books onto other players.

Cut and paste even if it was highlight and hot key and the same with KI pictures to an in game journal would also be nice.

As I have mentioned before I did an embedded story in UU that was an in game puzzle release chapter by chapter and on the back of that I am looking at using marker games as a puzzle element where collection order rather than speed is the key.

One of the other options relies on players doing some sort of math on the co-ordinates retrieved from a marker game to point you at some other location to retrieve some object or journal. To this end we would need not only co-ordinates for all ages but some prefix that designated the age almost like the three letter code used to designate an airport.

[J'Kla]

Sorry triple post

On MOUL there was an option of visiting different instances of the city When you then looked at buddies the legend told you someone was in the city but not which instance.

[Grogyan]

I think the KI should also display the time of day on the KI itself, or the minimized state in any case.

Edit: And how about changing the Carver time from MST/MDT to UTC?
I think that would make timezone calculations a lot easier (And IC we always link into the cavern anyway - and even with day/night cycle MST wouldn't quite cover the 30 hr cycle anyways.)

I know a lot of games always show the time of day, local or otherwise, particularly in MMO's

Question is where abouts on the KI itself would you want to put it,

Assuming this setup


would putting it in the KI chat window, in the bottom left corner near the marker game button?

Or in the main window in the top right corner as a seperate entity?

[J'Kla]

How about in the middle on top of the maintainer symbol book? My time on the mockup has not come out too clear I tried doing the edit in Photobucket less than satisfactory will try harder next time.

Or possibly if it was there have a button on the options page the one where you set font and chat persistence as a button to switch it off or on if you choose or a couple of buttons down the left side inside the markers ring I pasted 3 in but one on a rotating options would do but given 3 we could vastly increase our options.



I know I need more marker indicators with multiple colours to run marker quests over multiple ages say you have 24 markers per age to find the Ki displays markers found in the current age and toggling one of the buttons rotates trough the other ages with how many you need to get. Current age could be one colour and other ages different colours we know the KI is capable of doing red and green other colours should not be an issue.

[Jojon]

Reading through this thread, I haven't noticed anyone adding the need for an input history buffer to the list, so i'll just go ahead and put it here. :7

I believe we can all agree that ergonomics outtrumps aesteics, but that any functional design can be made pretty, with or without thoughtful modification? (although the other way around may not be the case)

Scrollwheel: somebody mentioned highlighting areas/scrollbars, but perhaps simply having the wheel working on whatever list/view the pointer is hovering over would be enough? opinions?

How many levels of holographic display sizes might it be un-cumberome to cycle through, with the press of a single button/selector? Any suggestions? A minimized one with only coordinates and time(s), plus perhaps some events indicators(s) or a plain text events string (either in a bar or a block) and the full one with users/chat/contents-view, would be a given, I suppose, along with one with the contents area disabled, but that's automagic.

Why do we have roman letters and in such a techie font too? Answer: Laxman. :) (Actually, the whole rest of the holo UI would be his tech-guy design too, so it figures it'd be clunky, really... ;)

EDIT: The thing with the coordinates in arabic numerals on the KI hardware itself may not be such a good idea from an IC point of view... :) (Besides, I find the particular segmented display on the old_KI picture barely legible; too busy, too little contrast.)

[Tyion]

Aloy's lol dude I think we need an updated idea list on page one.

[J'Kla]

We may even get to the point where we can give players a choice of KI in the same way you choose a skin for a PC MP3 player. IC options on this are not unusual a player could have taken his/her KI to the surface and paid big money to have it re-engineered and finished by a jeweller financing it by selling contraband D'ni artefacts.

Back to OOC Design we need to consider the I/O of the KI buffers storage on and off line possible user input. One of the bugbears in the old UU days was the inability to start a plain text line with the letter Z as well as obvious limitations when encountering the bad language filter (I don't even know if that was part of the KI or just general interface but anyone who was British with the name Richard had his name contractions severely limited.

Also discussions with the Dutch players re sea wall defences suffered a severe cramp.