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Ways to improve Text Chat

1393993737

Edited 1393994214
I played my first session over Roll20 the other day, and I couldn't help but notice that though it has great potential, there's a lot that is missing from the Text Chat that seriously detracts from its usability as a medium for RP. Timestamps: these need to be an option that can easily be turned on, and saved in the chat archive. It's extremely helpful to know when a post is fresh and bears response or is one you've already read. Equally, if not more important is the easy way to figure out breaks between sessions, or WHEN a given section of the archive happened; like if you are looking for something that happened at the session on X date, but don't remember the dialog (or want to have to hunt for it.) This is something that is very important to Text-based RP, and needs to be available as an option. Chat scrolling: it's nice to be able to see that people are typing, but the chat jumping to the bottom whenever that dialog pops up can be very aggravating when trying to read an earlier post. It'd be nice to have the option to disable it or control it in some way. Chat tabs: Being able to divide text-chat between, for example, OoC and IC is very helpful, as it lets players ask questions or discuss things without muddling the stream of IC events. Other uses of this include letting scenes diverge, multi-player+ GM chats, etc. It's an extremely useful and flexible tool, and the lack of it mars the experience of using Roll20. The "Test Macro" button posts to the chat pane. WHY?! That's not "Test" that's USE. If it can't be made to output to a separate, personal-only pane, it should be re-labeled to indicate what it actually does. Also, /ooc is not visually distinguishable to me or any of the people I was playing with. So either it's broken, or everyone I know doesn't have the visual acuity to tell between the shades of blue and grey that are being used. Whichever one, it's unusable as is.
1393999216
Lithl
Pro
Sheet Author
API Scripter
Variatas said: Also, /ooc is not visually distinguishable to me or any of the people I was playing with. So either it's broken, or everyone I know doesn't have the visual acuity to tell between the shades of blue and grey that are being used. Whichever one, it's unusable as is. /ooc sends the message as you, the player, rather than whatever character you currently have selected in the "Speaking As" dropdown box. That's how the message is differentiated. If you see "Brian:" on the left side with my Pasiap gravatar, I'm talking OoC. If you see "Blackstone:" on the left side with my Winter's Herald-polymorphed minotaur, I'm talking IC in my Saturday 4e game.
Unfortunately most people tend to change their display name to their character name instead of just using the drop down box.