Currently, Ares channels display like this:
[Chat] Dany says, “This is a brilliant witticism.”
I would like to plead the case for an alternate format, which reads so much cleaner to me:
[Chat] Danny: This is a brilliant witticism.
That’s all. I just think it’s much more visually appealing, I find the "s to make it look very cluttered and less scannable. The "s also make no-caps look incredibly dumb and even less scannable to my brain.
Thanks for the suggestion. The channel format mirrors the traditional MUSH channel interface, which is the same as poses.
ch Hi --> Danny says, "Hi."
ch :waves. --> Danny waves.
ch ;'s dog is the best. --> Danny's dog is the best.
While the ‘says’ example works fine with your proposed format, the others don’t work so well. Changing just one would be weirdly inconsistent for me.
But I’m open to hearing what other folks think about it.
I also prefer the style @Farfalla mentioned, which I’ve seen used on different games over the years. I don’t think it’s inconsistent with posing? It just looks like this:
ch Hi → [Chat] Danny: Hi.
ch :waves. → [Chat] Danny waves.
ch ;'s dog is the best. → [Chat] Danny’s dog is the best.
I guess I’ve never thought of it as needing to look like poses, since it resides in a totally different mental space.
Sign me up as another one in the @Farfalla style channels camp. The games I first used had that style, and I continued it on games that I ran back in the day. I definitely prefer it.
The commands you use to interact with it are the same as poses, OOCs, pages, etc. so it makes sense to me that the output would be the same. The Danny: thing for one version and not the others looks goofy to me personally, but it’s a taste issue. YMMV.
Just for balance: I strongly prefer the current version.
I think the [Channel] Person: Whatever! is the BorgComm output (and possibly MOO, it feels like maybe that’s where else I’ve seen it), but I’m with @Faraday and @Ren.
I like that using " outputs consistently across channels, poses, and OOC chat.
I’ve honestly never noticed that big a difference in my travels through various codebases (I feel like the way it displays now is consistent with Ye Olde PennMUSH? But I haven’t played on a Penn game in a dog’s age, so that is a misty memory). The current version reads OK to me, though it’d be lovely to have options if individual game-runners wanted to create them.
The current version is consistent with Penn and Tiny, which is pretty much all I’ve ever used. I never saw BorgComm/MOO which is probably why the other version seems so alien to me. I’m sure if I came from mostly MOO I’d feel the opposite.
At this point there’s enough of an even split that I’m inclined to just leave it as is, but I’ll leave the thread open so folks can weigh in. If it becomes like a landslide the other way I’ll think about it.