Lix chat history

[Silken Healer]

At 19:00:00 UTC today, me and Simon played some 2-player Lix. During it, the chat went to fast for me to properly read what Simon said, so the conversation topic come up of a suggestion for Lix that you should be able to go back and see the full chat history.

[Simon]

Yeah, in the lobby, the client shows only the recent 8 lines of chat.

During play, it's only the lines (of the recent 8) that are newer than 10 seconds. The idea is to avoid clutter during play. When a line times out here (is older than 10 seconds), the chat forgets it altogether, and it won't appear in the lobby later.

Is it enough to preserve the timed-out messages (what is older than 10 seconds during play) for after the match, to read them in the lobby?

It's more elaborate to add a back buffer and scrolling. Scrolling sounds low-priority to me, but you be the judge. Especially during play, do you really want scrolling UI?

-- Simon

[Silken Healer]

In my personal opinion, I think it would be pretty important to add scrolling UI, more than 8 lines back could could include important information you didn't get a chance to read, and you might not want to wait to go back to the lobby to read it. Perhaps the reason it sounds low-priority is because we normally play the sessions with Mumble, so now we've played some 1v1s, the chat becomes more important? Perhaps the full chat should only show when you start to type, to avoid clutter, and then when you're not typing you can't scroll?

Also, while we're on the topic of chat suggestions, perhaps the names could be the colour of your Lix's colour as well? Sometimes I found it hard to differentiate between which messages were mine and yours.

[Simon]

Player colors for the chat lines, yes, excellent.

Scrolling UI during lobby, hmmm.

Scrolling UI during play is harder. The sent chat lines are unclickable; clicks go to the game map. The chat area grows and shrinks when messages come in. But clickable buttons shouldn't hop around. Needs a solid design idea before I do anything here.

-- Simon