New Chat System

As you may have noticed the chat looks and works a bit different now. That’s because we just launched the first version of our new chat system MassiveChat. As you may have guessed MassiveChat is coded by Cayorion here on MassiveCraft.

Why change the chat system?

As authors of our own chat system we can tweak it to work exactly as we want it to.
For the future “sharding” project of ours we needed a sharding compatible chat system. MassiveChat is sharding compatible. The previous system wasn’t.
We have visions for future features (see section below) that we couldn’t add to the previous system.

News and Differences

The chat/channel command can be reached using any of the aliases c,ch,chat.

You can’t focus a channel using “/ch channelname” anymore. If you want to focus trade chat you should use one of these alternatives:

/ch focus trade
/ch focus t
trade:
t:

The new channel Local replaces Say, Whisper and Yell.

To Whisper: End your message with an asterisk (*)
To Yell: End your message with an exclamation mark (!)
To Say: Don’t end your message with ! or *

The radiuses:

Whisper: 3 to 10 blocks
Yell: 150 to 200 blocks
Say: 50 to 75 blocks

A new channel has been made called the “Help” channel. Please note this channel is not meant for chitchat or private conversations. The Help channel is purely meant for questions on the server. These questions would for example be:

How do I get to Ithania?
How do I make a faction?
How do I see who is an admin?
How do I make a diamond helmet?

The Help channel is purely made to allow players and staff to answer each other’s questions, about the server, about minecraft etc. It is not meant as a replacement for the helpop system, but should allow some volunteering helpfull players to take some work out of the staff hands by helping. The Help channel is mostly a player to player help channel, use helpops when an admin or moderator is necessary.

Cooldowns are now shared between a few channels. Speaking in general and then jumping to trade to avoid cooldown won’t work.

Future Features

[ADDED 2013-01-30] Partial name recognition is currently missing but will soon be added in. If you for example want to send a private message to Cayorion …

… this will not work:
/msg cay hello there!
… this will work:
/msg cayorion hello there!

For now you should use normal tab completion instead. Simply hit tab after you wrote “cay” and it will autocomplete to “Cayorion”.

[ADDED 2013-01-30] Yell and whisper in local will be added in the future. Currently the player is always “saying” stuff in local. In the future an exclamation mark (!) at the end of the message will make the player yell and an asterisk (*) will make the player whisper.

Emotes will be added in the future. They will be a form of local chat reachable using a “/me” command. They will be more than text-based. Appropriate sound effects will be added when possible. “/me shrieks” will for example state “playername shrieks” in the chat but the vampire shriek sound will be played as well.

Optional censoring will be added in the future. Censoring of harsh words will be enabled per default but can be toggled of by players wanting to hear them using “/chat censor off”.

Roleplay languages will be added in the future. Probably one for each race. You can as a player decide if you speak in the common tounge that everyone knows or your race specific one. Your message will be obfuscated for those that don’t know the language. An obfuscated tigran message could go something like “hurr durr” when saying “hi there”.

29 Comments

Sventen 2013-01-29 at 14:46

In the optional censoring thing, will you have to write that command every time you logg in as you do with dynmap?
- Sventen 2013-01-29 at 14:46
  
  (/Dynmap hide for example)
  - Herbie_77 2013-01-29 at 17:41
    
    I think it will be more like how you can toggel the race chat thing that pops up when your race power is activated. so you will mostlikely only have to type it in once.
    - mulligan3000 2013-01-30 at 08:05
      
      You can already disable this. (facepalm)
Maelbosha 2013-01-29 at 16:00

Will there be an ability for players to learn another language or teach one to another? A long time ago in a game called Everquest, you could find language primer books to learn the basics of a language. Then if you continued to listen to a foreign language that you had studied, you would slowing increase in understanding that language and the garbled text would become more and more clear. I think something like this would be really neat here.
- Maelbosha 2013-01-29 at 16:00
  
  I could also foresee other languages obtainable only by adventuring and finding them come into play in this type of language environment too.
- ulumulu1510 2013-01-29 at 19:37
  
  Nothing is impossible now ;) Maybe take that suggestion to the forum to hear more feedback?
profipix 2013-01-29 at 17:10

That’s awesome, good job Cay! :)
Blanclour 2013-01-29 at 19:04

Very good update, looking forward to seeing more.
Hamcheese35 2013-01-29 at 21:08

The only thing I dislike about this is that the faction you are in is hidden when you speak in global. I could give a few reasons why I dislike this
- Cayorion 2013-01-30 at 06:51
  
  This is something we changed yes. We felt the faction tag was taking up to much space in the chat window. You can still “/f show playername”.
  - mulligan3000 2013-01-30 at 16:11
    
    Tbh I preferred when when it did show faction name. I don’t get how you shortened the text in the chat window when you added ‘General etc. instead of just [G].
  - EyebrowsJ 2013-02-02 at 04:44
    
    I’d like it in local chat with color to know who’s raiding me if they say something.
kestenator 2013-01-29 at 21:09

Will you be adding the faction the person is in infront of their name like in the old chat?
Blanclour 2013-01-29 at 21:40

I hope this is added to the development repository :)
outsiderx2 2013-01-29 at 22:31

I was just thinking about this the other day…and now it appears…cool
Unimartin 2013-01-30 at 00:02

It’s OK right now, but I have high hopes for the future after reading this. My absolute favorite thing is the role play languages you guys are thinking of! Sounds AWESOME! Just make it race specific and unique, like Maiairs saying blub blub splash splash not just hurr durr XD Great improvement, can’t wait to see what the future holds!
- Cayorion 2013-01-30 at 06:52
  
  The “hurr durr” was a joke. The obfuscate words will be more race specific for sure ;-)
Imboring56 2013-01-30 at 01:17

Do you have MassiveChat for development on GitHub? If so, can you add it to the Dev page on this website? I would like to check out the code! :)
- Blanclour 2013-01-30 at 01:59
  
  Yes please :)
- Cayorion 2013-01-30 at 06:55
  
  MassiveChat will probably stay closed source for a few months since it’s one of the “sharding components”. I like open sourcing stuff but I also could not give out all the cutting edge technology at once due to competitive reasons.
  - EyebrowsJ 2013-02-02 at 04:45
    
    Then e-mail it. I couldn’t possibly make a server as good as Massivecraft, nor do I find any others.
TechPac624 2013-01-30 at 03:31

global has never been quiter :,,,,,D altho, why is it so quiet?
strider6106 2013-02-02 at 04:22

This sounds good, very creative idea with the race languages.
It looks like massivecraft is making its own ‘homebrand’ of plugins, so to speak. My only concern is that a future project is massivecrafts version of mcmmo. There also seem to have been several issues caused by mcmmo, almost a foreshadowing of its removal… An internal massivecraft version would be very good, but I speculate that will require the wiping of all current stats. Something on my mind, not necessarily a worry.

-Strider Stern
NordLord1 2013-02-04 at 08:41

Sounds pretty interesting, will we be able to download this plugin in the future? I would love to try it out on my small private server.
- NordLord1 2013-02-04 at 08:42
  
  Sorry nevermind, I saw the Cayorian’s response to the same question.
totalepikduk 2013-02-13 at 02:51

Excellent idea. Especially the race-changing language majigy. I’ve been dreaming of that ever since I played Massivecraft.
XSacrificeXzb 2013-05-15 at 08:03

I love this!! And wow I just said the same thing about the language but in the forums XD
MinecraftPlayerLol 2016-02-19 at 14:23

How to download?