WWWest-Online Development Blog

In an earlier post I started talking about the chat system in WWWest Online. As promised, a follow-up post.

When you chat, you’re sometimes chatting to a specific person, and sometimes just yapping away in a chat room. We’re going to have several built-in chat channels in the game for different uses. A general chat channel, a marketplace channel, maybe a newbie channel, things like that. We’ll also be including separate channels for party chat and guild chat, and perhaps we’ll allow player-made channels; we’ll have chat commands to allow the players to navigate between these channels. We’re obviously putting in a bunch of chat commands to manage player-to-player chat (e.g., tell, reply, retell), chat history (e.g., last messages sent and received), and other basic functions.

Now I don’t know about the rest of you but me, I’m sometimes old-school when it comes to computer games and software – I don’t approve of that newfangled “mouse” thing. Errm, yeah. Seriously though: Even though the mouse is great and has its uses, I often find myself shunning it and the mess of menu clicks I have to go to in order to do something, in favor of a couple of quick keystrokes on the good ole’ keyboard.

With that in mind we decided to try and make things keyboard-friendly. Obviously not everyone shares the same sentiments, so we’re not going to force the keyboard on anyone – we just want to give that extra option. What we want to do is basically use the chat interface as a miniature dedicated command prompt of sorts. Through it, the player will be able to do several things, such as digging up the profile for another player, alliance or whatnot, navigating through channels without clicking a dozen times, set up their equipment and/or organize inventory, and other things.

If you guys want we can post a list of the commands we’ve already implemented (even if these implementations are stubs at the moment) and the ones that we plan to implement, but have yet to get around to do so.

Kraz