Dialogue Terminal

[MacThule]

I like the new non-cubic computer decoration. I would really love to see a computer terminal that actually brought up a dialogue. Something where owners could write/paste a decent amount of text in full paragraphs.

The game is complex, and communicating the subtleties of mechanics, faction rules, important missions, and politics is not really facilitated by a wall of displays. It's hard to read. No one enjoys repeating basic things to every new player, and we want integrating new players to be something established players are willing to deal with. Something that can be dealt with efficiently, like with a room full of proper dialogues giving advice in a way that's easy to read.

I think it's be more helpful to make a computer block that when activated opens a GUI dialogue window like the spawn-in dialogue. A few of these around one's HB would let a faction really communicate with players in-game rather than referring them to a third party medium like the forums or a VOIP service (Teamspeak).

 

[Thalanor]

+1, and I'd suggest extending the functionality even further: have the dialogue to be an actual dialogue. That would mean that such a terminal could, for example, work as a button/activation block, activate/deactivate turret AI, etc. For that, we'd need some simple script language that builders could use to make terminals output a signal and/or change settings normally found only in the Ship tab under a set of defined conditions.

 

[Erth Paradine]

How about a documented API for the NPC interfaces? Lua programming?

 

[jayman38]

It would be nice to activate something and have it pull up a video on the client's screen. Like a link to a YouTube video. Then you can draw/write/produce whatever you like, at however long you need it, and it's simply linked-to in the game.

Bonus: sound and video effects to make it more compelling.

The dev team definitely expressed interest in improving the functionality of the display block. As always, the time estimate for such a change is much later, well after flora and fauna and AI factions and other things.

 

[MacThule]

+1, and I'd suggest extending the functionality even further: have the dialogue to be an actual dialogue. That would mean that such a terminal could, for example, work as a button/activation block, activate/deactivate turret AI, etc. For that, we'd need some simple script language that builders could use to make terminals output a signal and/or change settings normally found only in the Ship tab under a set of defined conditions.

This would be superb. It would also allow one terminal to house menus with many, many pages of information. To start with, implementing the simple terminal that activates an owner-edited dialogue should be extremely easy for the dev team and I hope the council forwards this proposal. Seeing in-game computer terminals that can function as legitimate dialogues is a fantastic end goal. Being able to link in logic and script activities from them would be fantastic. Using in-game computer terminals in such a way might also allow long-distance communication with other terminals on other entities.