Multiple Chat Windows

[potalot]

This is something I would personally like to see implemented to keep things neat. I searched and don't think this has been suggested before. Thoughts?

 

Here are a couple of examples of how it would look:

 

 

[BigShotJoe]

I never thought about it, but this would be a great feature. Being able to tune in to two of your chat tabs would be great instead of having numerous tabs that are nearly identical that you keep switching between. Only problem I can see from a user's point of view is the amount of space it would take up on the screen, but that will depend on the player. Probably have some way to turn one or both of them off.

[Perry]

This would take up so much space from the screen, plus you can change tabs in a matter of a click so don't really see an issue there.

[OrangeManiac]

1 hour ago, Pereiraa said:

This would take up so much space from the screen, plus you can change tabs in a matter of a click so don't really see an issue there.

The "if it isn't broken don't fix it" statement doesn't really work here. There does not need to be an evident issue inherently for suggesting something to be better. What comes to taking too much space, this obviously would be optional, something that could been toggled on from the settings.

 

I actually love this idea. Not only would it activate more people participating in Channel chat but I see a lot of other purposes for this as well. Getting Trade chat in an own window helps a lot to be able to effectively speak to your team and whispers without getting too much text in one window. Getting Battle chat in one window helps following the battle better and having a Team and Whispers on at another window. Sometimes discussing with some people for a longer discussion it may help putting that discussion in a separate Whispers window. I know there is an implemented personal message box but I find it clumsy and it's only for one person at once. 

 

TL;DR There's a lot of cases where I would be happy having to split up the chats in multiple windows and I doubt this is difficult to implement so some toggle to activate extra chat box(es) would make things sometimes more helpful.

 

Edited June 28, 2016 by OrangeManiac
just cuz

[Perry]

2 minutes ago, OrangeManiac said:

The "if it isn't broken don't fix it" statement doesn't really work here. There does not need to be an evident issue inherently for suggesting something to be better. 

This (obviously) isn't why I don't like the suggestion. I can say if I like or dislike something right?

I don't see this being that useful that's all. Plus the space it would take on smaller screens, pretty much only players with large screens would make use of this without completely covering the game.

[OrangeManiac]

1 minute ago, Pereiraa said:

This (obviously) isn't why I don't like the suggestion. I can say if I like or dislike something right?

I don't see this being that useful that's all. Plus the space it would take on smaller screens, pretty much only players with large screens would make use of this without completely covering the game.

My comment was not to criticize you from considering a suggestion unneeded, my comment was to criticize a comment which offered "a solution" to the suggestion by saying how using different tabs solves this but I wanted to explain it isn't exactly a perfect solution.

 

When someone makes a long thought suggestion (that is actually good), if a Suggestion Box moderator just drops a nuke to the thread by saying "this is unneeded" to me it just completely kills the discussion because when it is declared something is unneeded by a respective moderator to the community's eyes it looks like further discussion is basically useless.

[Perry]

7 minutes ago, OrangeManiac said:

When someone makes a long thought suggestion (that is actually good), if a Suggestion Box moderator just drops a nuke to the thread by saying "this is unneeded" to me it just completely kills the discussion because when it is declared something is unneeded by a respective moderator to the community's eyes it looks like further discussion is basically useless.

Not entirely true. Even though I am a Suggestion Box moderator I can still (and will) give my opinion on suggestions.

Yes I don't like this idea but one thing is to say I don't like it another is to come here and say 'This won't be happening.' and closing the thread as denied (which I never do).

[Tyrone]

I would actually like to see this.

As @OrangeManiac pointed out, it's completely optional and has obvious benefits.

Being able to track your Battlelog during a duel without chatter, while being able to read (team)chat somewhere else is useful.

With one chat box, the information is either dispersed (different chat tabs) or cluttered (too much different information in one chat tab).

This suggestion resolves that, of course OP's screenshots make it seem very over the top, but remember that the chatboxes should be resizable anyway.

[Spaintakula]

2 hours ago, Pereiraa said:

This (obviously) isn't why I don't like the suggestion. I can say if I like or dislike something right?

I don't see this being that useful that's all. Plus the space it would take on smaller screens, pretty much only players with large screens would make use of this without completely covering the game.

You can have an option to disable/enable them. It'd obv be disabled by fault, so yeah.

Kinda like the additional spell tabs in WoW, you start with 2, and you can enable the others if and whenever you want to.

[potalot]

5 hours ago, Pereiraa said:

This would take up so much space from the screen, plus you can change tabs in a matter of a click so don't really see an issue there.

Let me explain why it is an issue to me specifically. I already have to have the chat pretty much massive (screenshot) to be able to keep up with anything. Having more than one chat window would of course be optional, as optional as your current tabs and what each one displays, and would be disabled by default and enabled manually in the settings. I have battle chat on for PVP, and anytime I'm in PVP that instantly overtakes my chat completely. If you'll reference my original screenshots, I also enable multiple languages at times, which instantly doubles and sometimes triples the amount of messages flowing through the chat. It gets too cluttered to deal with and I miss trade / channel / whispers / literally everything on a regular basis. I'm also a bit OCD, and just prefer to keep my 'workspace' as neat as possible.

 

With that being said, I would get too much use out of this if it were an addition. I would personally have four squares, two on each side; one for channel, trade, battle, and one extra to flip between whispers and team. If the windows would support multiple languages, for example having one window for EN and one for ES, that would just help make things more neat as well, as I speak perfect English and only basic Spanish.

 

Added or not I'll still play, but I want this to be seriously considered as it really would make my experience a lot neater, and I feel like many daily players would get a lot of use out of this feature!

[BigShotJoe]

5 hours ago, Pereiraa said:

Plus the space it would take on smaller screens, pretty much only players with large screens would make use of this without completely covering the game.

Pretty sure it takes up the same percentage of screen space no matter how big your monitor is. On a smaller screen, everything will be proportionally smaller than on a larger screen. Of course, if you meant to say "window" instead of "screen", I can see your point. Still, everything about that situation would be re-sizable.

[Munya]

My main concern with this is which window does it focus when you go to type, will the first one be the only one with a response bar?

[Perry]

2 hours ago, BigShotJoe said:

Pretty sure it takes up the same percentage of screen space no matter how big your monitor is. On a smaller screen, everything will be proportionally smaller than on a larger screen. Of course, if you meant to say "window" instead of "screen", I can see your point. Still, everything about that situation would be re-sizable.

Pretty sure this is not right. The chat is always the same size if I'm not mistaken. I usually play on a small screen and the chat is /almost/ 1/4 of my screen.

While on bigger screens the chat doesn't take as much space.

[potalot]

3 hours ago, Munya said:

My main concern with this is which window does it focus when you go to type, will the first one be the only one with a response bar?

Ideally, it would have the response bar on each window, so that you could set each one to match. If you'll look at my original mocks in the first post, where they both say Channel, one would be flipped to Trade, etc. so that chat entered in one would go to channel, the other would go to trade, etc.

 

I see what you're saying though, it could be limited to one response bar, but that would be a decision the devs ultimately made if they decided to implement this suggestion in the future at any point in time. I'd prefer to just be able to open multiple versions of the chat as it is, with all the tabs, buttons, and options on each one. It would be even cooler if they were each managed individually, but it's not completely necessary and would require adding extra menus to account for each one having it's own options.

I strongly feel like adding some form of this as an option would only make the experience smoother for the people who would choose to use it, and would have no effect on people who don't. Thanks for considering it!

[BigShotJoe]

On 6/28/2016 at 3:03 PM, Pereiraa said:

Pretty sure this is not right. The chat is always the same size if I'm not mistaken. I usually play on a small screen and the chat is /almost/ 1/4 of my screen.

While on bigger screens the chat doesn't take as much space.

If we're talking about the same thing, that's simply not true. Monitors are always proportional. If you open the same window on a small monitor and a larger monitor, that window will take up the exact same percentage of the screen. It's simply how it works. Because of this, the chat window on PokeMMO will not be any bigger on a small screen. 

P.S. If your chat window is taking up a large portion of your screen, it's likely because you resized it to see more messages. If not, I don't know. After all, I'm an engineer, not a programmer.

[JonazDK]

On 28/6/2016 at 9:52 PM, BigShotJoe said:

Pretty sure it takes up the same percentage of screen space no matter how big your monitor is. On a smaller screen, everything will be proportionally smaller than on a larger screen. Of course, if you meant to say "window" instead of "screen", I can see your point. Still, everything about that situation would be re-sizable.

this is not correct 

Spoiler

 

[BigShotJoe]

4 hours ago, JonazDK said:

this is not correct 

  Hide contents

 

The only way this could possibly be accurate is if you had a monitor the size of a travel trailer. Seriously, who the hell has a monitor that size?

[potalot]

7 hours ago, JonazDK said:

this is not correct 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Back to the original suggestion, someone with this screen size could also benefit from having multiple chat windows. This whole argument about how resizing is handled when opening on different monitors is all fine, but the option to have multiple chat windows could still benefit these people, and if someone's screen is too small for multiple chat windows, they aren't at any more of a disadvantage than they already were. All I want is the option to be added to have multiple chat windows open. I never intended for this option to be forced onto anyone with any monitor size. If the way chat windows resize is an issue, someone could easily create a new suggestion thread to address any issues or suggestions they have about that topic.

Edited July 5, 2016 by potalot

[frogbussoms]

I have a regular size screen, Not big at all but not tiny..

 

But I could totally see myself using this, I hate having team chat conversations inbetween channel chat conversations, so i have both of them in there own seperate tabs, and I really hate having to click back and forth.

I'd really like something like this, not an issue that i don't have a big screen as I keep the chatboxes small anyway.

[Hassy]

If your computer screen is too small just don't toggle it on, why is it so complicated.... 

 

Anyway, this would be awesome! I can shit talk Bilburt in team and channel chat at the same time!

Edited July 5, 2016 by Hassy

[XelaKebert]

There are a few issues with this. For starters, there is the issue of real estate. Your example shows your chat windows taking up a huge chunk of your HUD. If you're searching for someone, this would make it more difficult to look for them. In hide and seek events you'd be at a disadvantage due to a limited field of view. The client does not use any DPI scaling, so a chat window of a fixed size will take up that number of pixels on one screen, but 1 pixel on one monitor may not be the same as 1 pixel on a different monitor. The best example is running the client on a 4K monitor versus a standard desktop monitor. The whole screen becomes super small because the images are in a format that is dependent upon the resolution.

 

Having this as a toggled option to make your tabs into separate windows seems more superfluous to me. To me a much better way of being able to achieve faster switching between chat tabs would be to have them assigned to hotkey shortcuts, similar to how the client handles hotkeyed items.

[potalot]

On 7/5/2016 at 7:49 PM, XelaKebert said:

There are a few issues with this.

You would never experience any of these issues if you never navigated into the options and enabled it. I don't understand why people would be against this at all, you wouldn't be required to use it, and it gives no one an advantage over you if they choose to use it. Your suggestion of having hotkeys for the tabs isn't at all what I want. I want to be able to see the separate chats at the same time, that is the entire point of this suggestion thread. If they added this today and you logged in, you wouldn't notice any difference. You would have to go into the menu and into the settings to enable it. I don't play hide and seek, but if I did, I could easily click the lock icon and resize the second window the same way I could do that to the first chat window today, which by the way creates the same issues you're talking about right now. It's a personal preference option, meaning if you don't prefer having two chat windows open, you don't have to do anything special at all to do that. You have to do something special to get the second chat window.