Regional Chat

[Lykourgus 0]

You know when you go in big servers and the chat has the tendancy to be all cluttered with non-sense that isn't really relevant to you? But when you go and say something to the guy helping you build your house, he doesn't read the message because it gets washed out by all the other chats? Well, given the quasi-realistic nature of this mod, I think it would be interesting introducing the option of regional chat. As in, nobody receives your chat within, say, 500 blocks (+/-). I've always found it a bit odd that you can chat with a friend when he's on another continent when you call the game "survival". Not to mention that survival isn't just about getting food into your guts, but also dealing with the psychological survival which is mainly dealing with the lack of help and contact. Essentially, surviving is supossed to make you feel isolated. Sure, this wouldn't make sense on a small server of 3 people if they are on different islands. But on bigger servers of 25-30 people, it would make an interesting experience.

 

Now this would of course be optional. As in, an option that can be enabled within the server's config file. And maybe eventually regional talks if there is such a way of integrating audio chats within the game and not via mumble or the likes. I feel as though isolation would be interesting especially when you find a town that you didn't know existed until you received a lone sentence from someone you've never seen before. Heck, even better, integrating text corruption the farthest you are away (Like when you can't immediately understand someone who's 250m away) So

 

Bob: Hey guys, how are you doing! -> @1e2o: H#y g20s, 2jk 92e y2k d92ng"

 

when he's really far away. Or something along the lines of:

 

Bob: Hey guys, how are you doing! -> Unknown: Hey....you doing."

 

to represent the corruption of a sentence when you can barely hear it. Anyways, those are my thoughts. This could be fairly easily done without any client side modification. You just have to modify the packets that are sent to players server-side. But client-side modification wouldn't hurt either.

[Kittychanley 1,002]

First let me stop you and say that TFC doesn't aim to be "realistic." It aims for being believable. Using the words "realism" and "realistic" are very dangerous on this forum.

 

Secondly this has been suggested many times before and has been declined due to the fact that there are already many other 3rd party mods and plugins that do this exact feature.

[Lykourgus 0]

Fair enough. I used the term quasi-realistic for that exact reason. Quasi being the prefix I was aiming for to mean almost.