(updated twice) A lot of people have been asking for this feature for a very long time. For that reason, I'm making a beta test version available even though it isn't fully cooked.
The chat panel starts out closed; To see what people are saying you either open it up (using the little down-triangle icon) or say something yourself. To say something, type it in like you would a guess, but with a single- or double-quote mark in front of it.
In the works: highlighting teammates, and the ability to customize who you see in chat (friends, teammates, people playing 4x4 or 5x5, etc.)
25 comments:
Nice work so far, and a sincere thanks for adding this feature. Using the name field for communicating (with an inherent 3.5 to 4 minute reception lag) has been awkward to say the least.
A couple random ideas:
1. Have a checkbox option for "newest messages on top" instead of a default "newest messages on bottom", or vice versa.
2. Make messages from friends or team members stand out from others (boldface, underline, different color text, etc.)
3. Private messaging capacity - either to specified individuals or to your team as a whole.
Evan, dear, I've been hooked on your game since my late husband turned me onto WeBoggle in 2005. I simply can not thank you enough for all my hours of joy from your work.
And if there is the slightest chance of convincing you AGAINST a chat feature, I hope to do so.
You see, I spent all afternoon reading your archived user comments. I saw only 1 or 2 individuals asking for chat (repeatedly) vs. several times their number of one-time commenters expressing indifference or opposition to it.
You may count me among the lattermost. I don't mean this to sound critical of you, hon, but you may not be aware WordSplay gets very slow and inaccurate on my PC in peak hours. It often tells me at the end of a round that some words I entered during play failed to get through in time to be scored (but I admit I was spoiled because that WeBoggle was so darn speedy!).
So ANY additional features will surely cause the game to go from sluggish to literally unplayable for us out here in the provinces.
But I am scarcely the first to mention this (hint=reread archives). If I somehow missed some vast thread of chat supporters not named Andrew, please point me there so I might better see the opposite perspective.
And if you likewise resurvey your constituents and find the same statistical trends I did... well, let's just say a chat rollout at this juncture positively flouts the Law Of If-It-Ain't-Broke.
And having spoken my piece, I join the ranks of one-time anonymous commenters and leave the decision up to you.
Regardless how you decide, Evan, I'll no doubt continue to play WordSplay even if I want to pull my hair out sometimes, so please forgive me sounding like such a crabby old broad. I thank you for all you've done and do, and I wish you good luck and brighter days ahead.
You are in my prayers.
Veronica L.
Larkspur, California
August 29, 2009
PS Just curious, is there a dollar amount you'd accept to belay the chat folly 6 months or a year? just teasing! (???) xox
right on, longwinded lady! Ms Veronica said so much i only got 2 words to add: FEATURECREEP DISTRACTION
oh wait & a few more---last damn thing i need is some punk kid to moon me goin ( | ) so it pops up in a window all in front of my sh1t while i'm busy findin my friggin words!!!
short comments, work em into yr handle like lauren & alex & that nutsack freak---long comments, post em on these blog pages here
wanna friggin chat---wtf i mean wtf ya doing on the wordsplay board?!?!?!?---probly same assohles who talk on the phone at the movies!!!
get tha hell off tha 5x5 & go chat on yahoo, ya effin sissies!!!
I'd love to have some kind of ranking feature. Not sure how this would work, but I imagine it being something like a chess ranking.
Veronica and jimnastyx1, I'm afraid that chat is here to stay -- but it's not so bad! It is off by default, and nobody else can force you to read it if you don't turn it on. When it isn't on, it doesn't consume any resources on your system. To the extent that it uses server resources, you're actually better off than before I added it, because some of the changes to the server that I needed to make in order to do chat right have made it much more efficient. I am now able to run more than twice as many Apache processes, and the server is running at 3% CPU load or less most of the time.
I too wish you'd please include private messaging! I believe it would help me improve my wordsplay scores if I could have a few friends all feeding me words at the same time, but without the other players able to peek at the words my friends send to me. Please please please add this feature! Thank you!
When I win, I like to be able to save the game. Back in Weboggle days, I used to use "snapshot" for this. It doesn't work now, but I used to use ctl-A followed by ctl-C, followed eventually by saving the clipboard into a file. But ctl-A doesn't do anything any more. Would like some sort of saving capability. Thanks.
Good lord, Evan! You fixed the latency problem! Keyed entry is instantaneous now. Thanks so much! This has been driving me nuts since...well, since WEBoggle died.
As for Chat, I'm among those who wouldn't be sitting in front of a computer screen if I had the urge to speak, but your implementation of the Chat feature is well-designed, completely unobtrusive, and has no affect on system response or game performance, as you said. So if its incorporation is what prompted the unsubtle improvement in processing efficiency, All Hail Chat! ;-)
Thanks again, and best wishes from another crabby old broad (i.e., me) for quick re-employment.
P.S. If there's any way we can contribute funds via surface mail, please let us know.
Umm...effect.
Heh.
Now that I've seen chat in action, I'd love to see it modified with a button to send the whole world back in time so I could play WEBoggle again.
This is the first time I noticed this - words listed as what "other players " got were in the list of words I submitted. I only noticed 2 before the new game started, but I didn't see this happen before, so it looks like a new bug to me. And there was a recent beta release.
Simplexity
The quotation mark is so close to the enter key that a slip of the pinky posts your guesses as chatter. Maybe players will get used to it and less garbage will appear...or maybe not. In any event, I prefer a chat box to the limited space of the name line. It's unobtrusive and I find it interesting to see what the 5x5's are up to. Also, now I don't have to scroll through the entire list of players to see if someone is trying to get my attention or highlight players to bring them closer to me when the results are posted. Saves me time which is always a good thing when playing a timed game. Thanks Evan, you done good.
I also noticed a few instances of what Simplexity described: I found words that I (supposedly) got credit for listed under "words other players found". It was only a few games, the day before chat became available (IIRC), so hopefully it's fixed and will not happen again.
Regarding chat: there appears to be a length limit which is enforced only in the display area, not in the entry field. This is kinda backwards, and I hope it's on the list of things to be fixed eventually. Other suggestions: separate chat areas for the two games, to reduce confusion and increase relevance; and different chat "delimiters", further from the standard text entry area of a keyboard -- say, asterisk and/or ampersand -- to reduce accidental chatter.
Juli
Agreed with the above; the quote key for chat is a minor irritation - at least a dozen times I've "chatted" one of my guesses, and every few minutes or so someone else will. There's as much accidental chatter as intentional.
I had an idea for the team display option. Instead of completely hiding all teams and their members when this option is not selected, why not have it just ignore team groupings, so all individual scores still get seen?
E.g. if players A, B, and C form "Team X", then depending on the status of the checkbox selection you'd either see only "Team X" in the score list; or only "A", "B", and "C" in their respective places.
The only potential problem I see would be the increased load of the score sorting algorithm running twice (once with incorporated teams, once without), but wouldn't that be server-side computation and pretty quick anyway?
Finally, I'd love for you to make statistics-rich accounts of some sort. Thinking idealistically, it would be awesome for you to keep track of which words I've found to date, the number of words of each length, number of wins, and many more things.
Just throwing out some ideas. I'm sure there are more important bugs and other things to do in the short term. Thanks again.
Thank you for creating Wordplay. I have two minor suggestions:
1. If five people have the same score, shouldn't they have the same rank? I would like to see tied ranking when that happens; and
2. If someone guesses a word that no one else has used, I'd like to see that person get a bonus point or two, depending upon how long the word is. After all, in Boggle, we only score that way!
Thanks!
Dale
On the topic of suggested features/details... Could there be some way to designate a team name as "open" or "not open"? I HATE it when someone joins in who's NOT WANTED...
Sorry, yes, I'm pissed right now: it's an excellent board but I can't play it because some moron who ISN'T US decided to join the team. Our name makes it pretty clear, I thought, but it keeps happening.
Two suggestions for the chat:
1. Use the 'maxlength' attribute on the input field so us long-winded folks don't end up with truncated comments.
2. Please don't clear the input box when a new game starts! Either that, or have a separate chat input box, or something. As it is, I can't actually use the 30 seconds between games to chat, because it keeps erasing what I write just as I'm almost done.
A non-chat related suggestion: it would be good to highlight words found by only one person. Bonus points for such a feat would also be nice, but I actually want the highlighting more than the points. Perhaps list those words in bold? (Naturally, you'd still need to point at the word to see who got it.)
My god, the longstanding latency issue has gotten 10 times worse than ever, so bad that I only get to play every other round during heavy times because it takes more than 3 min to reload the screen after each game. It's been weeks since I've played a round where every word I entered in time got counted -- in fact, it's common now for me to see 2 different scores on my screen, a local score for words that did get counted and then a lower score for words that got counted plus made it to the scoreboard server.
If this is progress, please don't ever make another "improvement" -- seriously, this latest version sucks the fat one so bad I hardly even play anymore.
Thanks!
I still can't play. Nothing happens when I hit the 4x4 link or the 5x5 link. Help
About the time Chat was added, I started experiencing problems with performance. At first, it was a matter of scores and new rounds not being displayed, and having to go out and reload to rejoin. Or, response would disappear for as much as 30 seconds or more before the highlight function would execute and control would allow me to enter words.
Now, it's a situation where the program is not accepting about a quarter of the keys I am pressing (and the letters appear after a time lag).
Maybe this doesn't have to do with CHAT. I just tried closing ALL the boxes, word lists, etc. except the one for word entry, and the key-lag problem persists. It makes playing impossible. Any suggestions?
I am using IE8. A look at the Task Manager shows the program taking up something like 25% or more of the cpu. That seems kind of high for sitting there looking at a non-moving board.
PS--I'd like to add to being able to tell what unique words are found by my teammates and by other folks. Best of luck with the lawyering gig!! And thanks for this game, though I can't seem to play it anymore. :-(
OboePhil--Team Philharmonic
is the game down? cannot connect to server this afternoon. nov, 11, 2009
Evan, has anyone told you about the bug with the chat window where a line gets stuck at the top? It crops up totally randomly. When it does, everyone sees at least one copy of the "stuck" line, but for some people, it'll get duplicated, so they'll see two or three copies of the "stuck" line at the top of their window. The line(s) hide(s) the newest chats, so people are perpetually behind a step or two. When the chat window gets buggy like that, nothing seems to help - refreshing doesn't make it go away, and the line will show up and be stuck for people who joined the game long after the line was first written. (Tonight's line, courtesy of A. Boggle, was "Yeah, we had chicken for dinner.")
1) It would be nice to have a timestamp on the chat to see how old a comment was.
2) it would be nice to automatically turn off the notes and turn on the chats panel when logging in - the same way I can automate it to go right to the 4x4 game.
Thanks.
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