Simply put a borg that reads outloud any text message sent from any player in the game. I hope that in downloading this borg members of the community could post their findings/bug reports in this thread.
http://winbolo.us/pics/speaker/NewswireSpeaker.zip
Links of interest:
How To Configure and Use Text-to-Speech in Windows XP
Microsoft Agent download
Last edited: Nov 19, 2005 06:05 (edited 1 time)
Indeed it tells you what is said over the newswire.
How would you feel about speech recognition?
If you can do that is there any possibility of getting newsire messages into a more reader-friendly layout?
Yes, and not in the typical "IRC" fashion but rather something where your eyes could read a line of text to the end without it jolting up twenty pixels to make room for newer messages as they come in. Conjure up some ideas for me, Noba.
Perhaps two windows? One for general in-game BS, another for more pertinent things? Kinda like a PM chat only broader.
I play another game online that has a chat system that seems to work out well. To change from chatting in general chat, you add a prefix. //[text] is for team, /[text] is a private message (once you've selected the person off the list). It's hard to describe the whole shebang without blabbing but I think you get the idea.
I'm sure not having to have your eyes jump up 20 lines is a worthy cause I'm just not sure about any practical solutions.
Distinguishing between pertinent information and otherwise seems to be a hot topic in WinBolo. I understand your idea but with string stuff ("/goodtext calling..go" vs "/badtext spam") it leaves actions up to the other player who in the end won't bother with it anyway.. A filter system could be used sending messages that contain strings such as "Calling" or "Hold" to one screen while others are sent elsewhere, which could be gathered from the player using a "Filter settings window" or similar approach, although the purpose of the text-to-speech stuff was to keep the users eyes close to his tank and mouse instead of wandering around the screen and such.
One idea would be using a Windows balloon to gather the users attention in a non-obtrusive way, sort of like a tooltip that displays the important messages while the spam could be sent up through a console window (dark DOS window) and thus provide instant differentiation.
You've sparked some intuitiveness ideas.
I should've clarified that both paragraphs were different ideas. The general chat and team chat actually works quite well, that I've seen, and that game's even more full of assholes than this one.
If you'd like to get a better idea of what I'm talking about, go here:
http://beginners.subspace.net/
And as always, there's people that spam it up like there's no tommorow but people generally keep their BS for the general---I guess it's a broader audience to annoy.
---Nova
