Add Ability for the Player to See Who is Online

[ADisorderlyFashion]

I recall this being mentioned in another forum post, but when I try to look for the post, I am unable to find it again.

There is a mod which already exists which does this simply called PlayerList, but the mod does not work unless the server owner also adds the mod to the server. The mod author claims the mod is supposed to work without the mod on the server, but the instructions cause the game to crash whenever I try to log into another server with the mod enabled I have since reported this, but I expect this mod to not be an adequate solution going forward because of the last portion of the description.
 

Quote

Remember, I build these mods for myself and my family. Not you. I owe you nothing. I just like sharing what I've built with others for free. You will receive minimal to no support when using any of my mods.

I respect the mod author's decision to apply this policy to their mod. They are not a developer, and as such, there are limits to what can be expected regarding support for this mod. Since reliability is something that cannot be expected of a feature I believe should be in the base game anyway, I feel my efforts are best spent requesting this issue be resolved by people whom I can actually expect support from as someone who is referring to a feature in a game I have purchased and convinced others to purchase.

So as it stands, the only way to view how many players are online at any given time in a server is to install a different mod whose main purpose is not what I am seeking. This is not an adequate solution because the mod does other things which deviate from the vanilla experience more than would be desired for such a simple issue. I'm also not fond of the fact that the mod in question, HUD Clock, appears to spam the console with the current rift activity. This on its own is not a major issue, but gets in the way when debugging the game, as I tend to do as a Linux user who uses quite a few mods.

So then, why do I believe such a feature is important enough to warrant addition to the base game? Simply because whether or not another player is online alters a somewhat basic mechanic of the game, sleeping. The player is unable to sleep if there is more than one person online. (unless another mod exists or some configuration option I'm unaware of, but then it falls on the mercy of every single server owner to change these when I could more easily adopt to this by checking the information myself)

There are multiple solutions I myself can think of to solve this issue that require little effort on the part of the developers. The first of which is simply to show how many players are online. I suspect this information is already exposed, but not shown to the player, because otherwise I'm unsure how modders would've been able to make mods which show this information. If I am wrong and this is something they had to implement on their own, I will need to look into the process myself in order to come up with a better solution.

[idiomcritter]

Think the command .online shows who is currently online.  Its helpful, though I've not figured out how macro's work to assign the command to a key to save a few keystrokes idk...

Edited January 8 by idiomcritter