How do you do OOC chat?

[Aljavar]

I'm pretty new to FG, bought the Full and I am getting started with some friends currently. We've tried online roleplaying in the past and we really liked the idea of having the game chat "clean", with no OOC chat. Makes for more atmosphere, as well as an nice archive of the story as it develops, etc. I know a lot of you guys like the live voice services (Teamspeak, etc). Here's my questions:

1) After using live voice services, would you ever go back? Is it indispensible or is it just icing on the cake?
2) For those of you who don't (or did at one time) use voice services, how do you seperate roleplaying chat from OOC chat? Have you ever used an external IM program to facilitate this? How did you make it work if you did seperate the chats?
3) Is tabbed chat coming out in the next release? I believe I read this somewhere in the forums. (BTW, this feature alone would double my satisfaction with the product).

Thanks in advance!

[gurney9999]

I personally don't like talking on voice chat when I run games (I use Yahoo Voice Chat), but I do have it on to allow players to chat and/or ask questions out of character. That way the chat inside of FG should be pretty clean and 'in character.'

[richvalle]

1. I can't see going back from voice in my game (with friends). Though I would not be against using text chat in someone elses game.

rv

[joshuha]

Our group is considering using Teamspeak or Ventrilo for OOC but not sure if it will help or hurt.

One thing you can do to keep you campaign logs clean is to make sure everyone is using OOC to communicate that content and then strip out those lines from the log. Each OOC line be default should be green in the log and be preceded by


<font color="#005500">


If you don't want to do this manually I think I wrote a VB app somewhere that will go throught the file and remove the entire line where this code is. I haven't cleaned my log in awhile though so I need to find it.

[richvalle]

Our group is considering using Teamspeak or Ventrilo for OOC but not sure if it will help or hurt.

One thing you can do to keep you campaign logs clean is to make sure everyone is using OOC to communicate that content and then strip out those lines from the log. Each OOC line be default should be green in the log and be preceded by


<font color="#005500">


If you don't want to do this manually I think I wrote a VB app somewhere that will go throught the file and remove the entire line where this code is. I haven't cleaned my log in awhile though so I need to find it.

Yes, I did the same sort of thing using Unix commands.

rv

[devinnight]

We use Ventrilo for OOC stuff, though some OOC stuff still game related is done in chat.
Having the ability to clear up situations or answer questions verbally is a huge plus in my opinion.
Also helps if the game crashes or your house catches on fire and you want to leave quickly but don't want to be rude.
Some of the things my players thought was that we would be role-playing verbally which usually doesn'h happen.
A free voice app can never hurt. Ventrilo's server is free for non-commerical uses and up to 8 connections.
-D

[joshuha]

If you don't want to do this manually I think I wrote a VB app somewhere that will go throught the file and remove the entire line where this code is. I haven't cleaned my log in awhile though so I need to find it.

EDIT:
App reposted on www.fouruglymonsters.com site.