Local Chat tweak

[Tom Cantine]

Maybe this already exists, but I'd like to be able to toggle on and off the general chat for my utterances, leaving just the speech bubble above my seraph's head. There are a lot of dialogs and conversations between players that don't really need to be broadcast to everyone on the server, and can scroll important notifications (temporal storm imminent) off the window sooner than necessary.

One of many benefits to this would be making community meeting locations (coffee houses and pubs and lecture halls and private room) more attractive and engaging. 

[PineReseen]

Hell yeah! I haven't played multiplayer yet, but this seems like a very very good feature to implement.

There's another game called Barotrauma, it barely has any relation to VS, but there is a local chat feature in the game, that makes people's messages more and more garbled the farther away you are from the one speaking in local chat, which allows for revolutionary activity/aimless banter to remain in a close area to the one speaking.

I think making messages in non-general chat also be recorded (Maybe in a different colour) to whoever is close by and being more corrupted the farther away someone is would be nice, but I'm not sure how much more code-intensive that would be.

[Thorfinn]

On 3/31/2025 at 3:31 PM, Tom Cantine said:

Maybe this already exists, but I'd like to be able to toggle on and off the general chat for my utterances, leaving just the speech bubble above my seraph's head. There are a lot of dialogs and conversations between players that don't really need to be broadcast to everyone on the server, and can scroll important notifications (temporal storm imminent) off the window sooner than necessary.

One of many benefits to this would be making community meeting locations (coffee houses and pubs and lecture halls and private room) more attractive and engaging. 

A game whose name I cannot bring to mind did this by looking at the first word in the chat text. The default was "say", which was extremely local, like a room or sitting around a campfire. "Shout" or "yell" got a larger distance, and "broadcast" was global, though was extremely limited in terms of permissions. Most players were not allowed that. But you could work around that if you knew the character name. "Brother_Maynard, I need help at the cave of Caerbannog!"

[EDIT]

Still can't remember the name of the game, but I just remembered it was a multiplayer D&D-ish game on a CDC Cyber 170 Model 720 mainframe back in the '70s. Used what were called "common decks" to share data, which fortunately, was no longer a stack of punched cards.

Edited April 5, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Tom Cantine]

MANY games have this kind of feature. I played for quite some time on a MUD (multi-user dungeon), entirely text-based, which implemented both a character's hearing acuity and their language proficiency to give every player in a room a custom echo for overheard conversations. People at the next table, speaking quietly in another language, you might pick up one or two words.

Playing on the Official Server, language is already supported in that I see people in the chat using Russian, German, occasionally French and sometimes languages I'm not sure I recognize. There is support for group chat channels, but it'd be pretty inconvenient to have to create a new group and invite people to it for every random private conversation you might find yourself in.

The thing is, VS already has the elements to make a local chat option utterly seamless. When you say something in the general chat, it ALSO appears over your seraph's head like a speech bubble. It seems to me it would take very very few lines of code to toggle whether or not your utterances also were broadcast to the chat, and that'd make it SO easy to just have a quiet conversation with someone who happens by your shop to admire your build or buy some cheese or whatever.