MAngband

Hello guys, it's been a while! Hope you've been doing well the past 5 or 6 years. :)

So, I played a bit this last weekend and had a lot of fun, but was left feeling that the messages and chatting system could possibly use a little sprucing up.

1.
So, there's a feature of TomeNet that I really liked back in the day, namely the colorized messages. In fact, I liked it so much that back in 02 or 03 I think I worked on a patch to adapt TomeNet's message colorizing to MAngband. Just this past weekend when I played for a little bit, I found myself craving these colorized text messages.

Has anyone thought about adapting message coloring to MAngband? My old patch might be hanging around somewhere.

2.
Another feature that I'd really like to see is multiple chat channels a la IRC, unless this has been done already. You know,

:/join #my_party
:hello --> goes to #my_party
:!hello (or something like that) --> goes to everyone
:/leave #my_party
:/join #bobs_party
[error: you are not in party bobs_party]

3.
Is there any reason that the chat history isn't appearing in the chat window in Windows? If there's a way, it should be on default. If there's not, I think it would possibly be a good improvement.

-Alex

Hi Alex!

It was great playing with you guys last weekend, gotta do that again soon :)

But, to the point - I haven't played enough tomenet to remember what their colorized messages were like, but my first thought is that it sounds like it could be messy and uncomfortable to the eye, I mean, mangband has been carefully handcrafted into a very solemn and zen-like experience so personally I'm a little wary about putting too many colors and too much stuff into it. You mean putting more colors into the mirror as well as the regular term4 and at the top of the main window?

About chat - definitely agree we could use a lot of improvement here, it's not very practical at the moment. But! For both those suggestions we've got a Roadmap where the next big release (1.2.0) will be focused on improving the player experience, with enhancements to the client GUI as well as the chat system.

We're always happy to see suggestions and maybe even more so patches so if you'd be able to find anything that'd be cool :)

It's been a while so I don't completely remember how the messages worked, but IIRC they helped make talking more clear as a player's message would correlate with their in-game color. Additionally, I seem to recall thinking that certain game messages such as "Foo was killed by a plasma hound" being printed in red just seemed appropriate and added to the experience. How about adding a client-side option to always display all messages in white? Or, we could perhaps just check if the name equals 'Warrior'. ;) If nobody likes this idea then I won't do it, but I think it could possibly be cool & might be willing to take a stab at it.

wortle wrote:It's been a while so I don't completely remember how the messages worked, but IIRC they helped make talking more clear as a player's message would correlate with their in-game color. Additionally, I seem to recall thinking that certain game messages such as "Foo was killed by a plasma hound" being printed in red just seemed appropriate and added to the experience. How about adding a client-side option to always display all messages in white? Or, we could perhaps just check if the name equals 'Warrior'. ;) If nobody likes this idea then I won't do it, but I think it could possibly be cool & might be willing to take a stab at it.

Whoops, my bad -- I didn't somehow didn't see the term4 window when playing last weekend. Funny, I don't remember message colors being in MAngband back in the day, or maybe my old memory is just failing me? :|

Yes the colorized messages is a new feature in 1.0.