Minor, But Effective

[KillerQween]

Another game I play has this, and I think it would great for EL to have it as well. When someone is in another screen (the game isn't active), or afk, a pair of green "glasses" appears on their face to indicate to all around they are not there. I know glasses are a bit hard in EL, considering how small the faces are. But what about a screen, or a name changing color, or something along those lines?

[Malaclypse]

We already have the afk message to tell other people someone is not active.

Also there are technical problems involved with this. Maybe the game you are referring to is only playable on one platform, so it's no a big thing to implement such a feature. But EL is a multi-platform game. We would have to code this feature for any platform supported, as each of them has a different way on how to handle the window focus.

It's becoming even more difficult, in that on *nix like systems (linux, bsd, macos) the user has the option to choose between several different window managers. There are at least 30-50 different window managers for X Window out there. AFAIK the focus is grabbed and handled by the window manager on *nix, which in turn passes it to the X Window server, this means we would have to look at all those window managers to be able to achieve this. Sounds a bit of an overhead for such a feature.

But even if we don't need to bother with any window manager out there, we would need at least have to handle with the three different major platforms that are supported.

[Ghrae]

What about having the name then "gray out"? That is, when they went afk, their name and guild tag would turn into a dull gray.

[Leeloo]

SDL generates some kind of focus event. It's the one that was suggested to use to prevent the DirectX bug (EL stealing ICQ messages).

 

It will require extending the protocol, but apart from that shouldn't be hard to do.

[kl4Uz]

I don't like the idea. We already have the afk message when you mention a name next to that afk person or when you pm her/him.

[Ghrae]

I don't like the idea. We already have the afk message when you mention a name next to that afk person or when you pm her/him.

153394[/snapback]

You're right of course. I could PM you at in-game time 1:00 and find out you are AFK by getting your message.

 

However, if I were to PM you at in-game time 1:45 how am I to know that you are STILL AFK? There are no additional messages sent to allow that person to know your current status, especially after an elapsed period of time.

[Leeloo]

I don't like the idea. We already have the afk message when you mention a name next to that afk person or when you pm her/him.

 

Do you have reasons for not liking the idea, except that *you* don't need it? Like, any bad things about it? Do you see any reasons why it shouldn't be done, even if others like the idea?

 

What I'm trying to find out here is whether your "don't like it" should be more like "don't care" or "no way".

[kl4Uz]

Well maybe I didn't get the idea, but I just don't like to have glasses on when my char is afk or something. Maybe a little * next to the players name, that would be okay and not annoying. I don't need that, but I could totally live with that. I just hate importunate stuff, like stuff that affects the look of my character or stuff that is really flashy, because personally I don't care if most of the chars are afk or not - if I'm really interested I just pm them.