What Should Untold Dawn's Emoting Style Be?

Right now we have an emoting style similar to Diku-mud where you can do tell player (emote) speech, say (emote) speech, emote, get object (emote), etc.

We do not have yet a character limit.

Should we have one? Is this the optimal emoting style? Let us know!

No character limit for the love of god. I hate when I am trying to be descriptive and get hit with Jarod does all this awesome…

I personally prefer Arm style emoting with ~targeting type. I didn’t like how you had to specify differences in SOI, I think people were ~ and objects were # there, super confusing.

Yeah that seems fine. No character limit, there’s just no reason for it IMHO. The players will set a style and newbies will probably catch on pretty quickly.

I myself never managed to make use of the Diku one because of my trouble with targeting people properly when in a room of six scarred desert elves. Even with that though, I believe it’s a good system when using a targeting prefix such as ~ as mentioned there.

I agree that no character limit should be introduced. A counter-point to this would be that you get situations where you wonder if your scene-mate is still awake or not while they’re spinning some yarn about how they’re playing with their hair. This is a niche enough problem that I don’t foresee appearing.

I did see that we have emote echoing with what you see, but I believe it’d be worth adding an optional ability to have it echo you what others see. This helped me enormously in Sindome to get comfortable with the pose system as I can just mess around and see exactly what someone else might see rather than a first person perspective of it.

@Fleshbound brings up a good point, I’ve been dipping my toe in Apoc and it’s passable but one thing that jars me beyond jarring with them is if you type Hunt, it doesn’t say, “You kneel down and look for tracks.” It shows you in the third person like “The hooded douchebag kneels down and starts to look for tracks.” and you momentarily panic until you realize it’s speaking about you.

Emote and action triggers need to be in first person to the person doing them IMO and the code should support the emote in both third and first person.

-Echoing how a pose shows to the room: Seconded, this is invaluable but can we make it a toggleable option?

-Action echoes being in the first person: Seconded. That IS jarring isn’t it? I experienced that myself recently.

As a player, I generally don’t mind the length of emotes, but I do appreciate shorter ones in busy scenes with multiple participants. Typically, there’s a natural balance that emerges, and it’s rare to see significant discrepancies in emote lengths among scene participants.

However, I recently encountered a situation where every emote seemed to span almost an entire page. In a bustling scene, the absence of any limit on emote length seemed to prompt individuals to respond to each person in the room with one single emotes, each in a separate paragraph within it. This became overwhelming and somewhat disorienting to follow.

Good points here. I don’t mind either style, but I do get annoyed when it isn’t consistent. I’ve played LPMUDs that try to be clever about making anything you enter appear first person to you and their help files never said which style you should write in. I’m a fan of writing in the third person and the game just never tries to conjugate for you so it just looks the same to you as everyone else. That’s the best way to avoid ambiguity IMO. If that’s not gonna be a thing here, then I agree with the sentiment of making the tester echo both what you’d see and what they’d see.

As for page-long emotes that address everyone, that’s bog standard for MUSHes. I don’t think we’d have that here. I’d say keep the thought on the back burner, then implement it if the need arises. Alternatively, implement it and set the limit to u32::MAX and lower if needed.

Yeah I’d be inclined to agree, I don’t think it’ll be too much of an issue here. I think we should be diving in limitless and seeing how that works.

Regarding emoting style, I don’t have a strong preference. I maybe lean mildly towards Diku style, I think it’s quick to pick up for beginners and comfortingly familiar to oldbies.