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Cellowyn
January 17th, 2006, 03:17
I have a few suggestions to change and possibly improve the interface. From a GM perspective, I'd like to see these things:
1. More "mouse-able" controls, meaning that right clicking on PC tokens would enable certain functions that are currently commands (like whisper or OOC, etc.)
2. Less reliance on the chat window for everything.
3. The ability to mask shared text documents when provided to the players to read. I was running the Wizards Amulet, and all the text is in blocks. It was all or nothing when I was draggin text into the chat window for the players. Either that, or sharing the entire body of the adventure module.
4. Instead of hiding all the text, display it all, and hide the DM specifc items, like monsters and other information in the players display. Text types would handle this. Also, break up the commentary or text items that can be shared in the chat window into sentences so that GMs can move individual portions of them to the chat to be read.
5. Integration of a voice chat function would be good too, and would take the load off the chat board.
6. Better facility to play NPCs, with all the functionality of a player. Right now, it is hard to manage them, since they have to be written up specially.
7. Generating modifications to the rolls is currently somewhat ineffective. Only certain items can be dragged there for the roll, and often times, the information brought over it not effective in generating the roll, especially for the GM. I often find myself rolling off the chat box and doing eveything manually - which is fine, but the interface should handle it in a more intuitive manner.

Other than these things, the system is top notch, and can only get better in small increments. My biggest hope is #1, since it opens up all sorts of functionality.

Thanks, and feel free to comment - but hold the curses :)

Joe

cogollo
January 17th, 2006, 07:53
I also think idea #1 above would be incredibly useful, specially to make it easier for the DM to whisper to other players.

I also wanted to remind the community an idea I read some time ago in this forum (sorry, I don't remember who proposed it to give him/her credit for it). The idea was to be able to create different threads of conversation with different persons in the group. There would be some tabs beside the chatbox so that you could easily switch between threads. In each thread you could have one or more players to speak with, so that if the group splits and you want to send a message to more than one person you don't have to repeat whispering commands.

Crusader
January 17th, 2006, 13:05
#5 is also something that have been discussed. I for my part find that it is often better to seperate functions - let Skype/Teamspeak/Project Gizmo and whatnot do what they do best, and let FG do what it does best. I'd rather that SmiteWorks concentrated their efforts in doing FG the best vessel for online RPG's and having a second application that is the best vessel for voice-chat - that is something the user-community benefits from rather than having a one-in-all application that fails in both aspects.

Having said that, I'd still like to see the possibility to play soundeffects in FG.

richvalle
January 17th, 2006, 18:08
I have a few suggestions to change and possibly improve the interface. From a GM perspective, I'd like to see these things:
1. More "mouse-able" controls, meaning that right clicking on PC tokens would enable certain functions that are currently commands (like whisper or OOC, etc.)

Nice idea.



2. Less reliance on the chat window for everything.

I'm not sure what you are asking for here. Die roll results and talking needs to show up somewhere. Can you expand on this one?



3. The ability to mask shared text documents when provided to the players to read. I was running the Wizards Amulet, and all the text is in blocks. It was all or nothing when I was draggin text into the chat window for the players. Either that, or sharing the entire body of the adventure module.

So... being able to mask part of the text in a text block before dragging it? Or masking an image of a text document (such as the letters that were in WA).

I think you can do the latter. FG won't care if the image is of text or a map. Mask it and then unmask the parts you want the players to see. Cool idea btw. I'm not sure what you are asking for with 'shre the entire body of the adventure moduel'... sorry.



4. Instead of hiding all the text, display it all, and hide the DM specifc items, like monsters and other information in the players display. Text types would handle this. Also, break up the commentary or text items that can be shared in the chat window into sentences so that GMs can move individual portions of them to the chat to be read.

This is something that either you setup or the creater of the adventure in question. In this case, I was part of the team that converted WA to FG.

We kept the text blocks the same as they were in the original Necromancer Games module. It would not be hard for you to go in and break them up into one sentance lines though.

Again, I'm not sure what you are asking for in the top part.

Note that when we made WA some of the options in FG that are there now were not available and we would have made it a bit different if we went back and redid it.



5. Integration of a voice chat function would be good too, and would take the load off the chat board.

What Crusader said. Someone also brought up a very good point in that by using a 3rd party package, if FG has a problem you can still talk to everyone since it is NOT built into FG



6. Better facility to play NPCs, with all the functionality of a player. Right now, it is hard to manage them, since they have to be written up specially.

Such as...? You don't like how the npc's are in as personalities but would rather have them in the same format as players are (full sheets). If so, I'd rather have the small boxes so I can manage more of them easier. I WOULD like to see the informaiton in the small boxes be more interactive... so we could drag and drop the BAB and roll it.

BTW, you might want to check out the NPC Generator that ... Umm... RPG Attitude (I think it is) created. You can select FG as an output option and then cut and paste it into the FG files to create npc's. A but cluncky but still nice.



Other than these things, the system is top notch, and can only get better in small increments. My biggest hope is #1, since it opens up all sorts of functionality.

Thanks, and feel free to comment - but hold the curses :)

Joe

Bah... no curses here! Nice post but I hope you expand on some of the ideas as I'm missing what you are asking for.

rv

Thorlord
January 19th, 2006, 01:41
some UI requests:
1: More lighting effects some underwater ones would be sweet. as well as one for a dark (evil) place and one for a snowy place.
2: Some animations would be fun for the lighting effects. but put the animated ones in a second row as an option. what i mean by animated is say when you select campfire some movement of the ambiant fire across the screen would be awesome (though i wouldent want to play with it on all the time. but the animation would be sweet for the time being)
3: give the GM a small little clock that he can change the time on (allow for a hotkey to add 1 hour) have this change the current enviroments lighting effects baised on the time.
4: an icon next to the characters that shows what time of day is would be sweet. even cooler if the DM can tell the players what the weather is by the icon (rainy, snowy, sunny, hail, dark, full moon, no moon, half moon, thunder, sunrise, sunset)

richvalle
January 19th, 2006, 01:57
some UI requests:
4: an icon next to the characters that shows what time of day is would be sweet. even cooler if the DM can tell the players what the weather is by the icon (rainy, snowy, sunny, hail, dark, full moon, no moon, half moon, thunder, sunrise, sunset)

Someone made this for FG a while back. We had it on Adventuresome Dreams (RIP :( ). Maybe it made it to the new site that has risen from the AD ashes!

Check out https://www.fouruglymonsters.com/ . If you don't find it, ask about it and someone should have it and can send it to you.

I think it was an image that you could share with boxes in it. Then there were different tokens for weather effects you could put in. Maybe the time of day was shown as well.

rv

Snikle
January 20th, 2006, 02:00
Check out https://www.fouruglymonsters.com/ . If you don't find it, ask about it and someone should have it and can send it to you.
rv

I have not seen this yet, I had a random generator for weather, but it was just a story page (unforunately in my recent system reinstall I lost that). I do not think we have this on the site, yet, if anyone has it, please send it to us (snikle at fouruglymonsters.com) and I will see about getting it on the site.

richvalle
January 20th, 2006, 05:10
Ilwan had something to do with making the tokens for it. I'll check this weekend and see if I have it.

rv

mr_h
January 20th, 2006, 15:28
Is this what you guys are looking for?

https://supernovagaming.com/~mrh/DnD/FG/TimeAndWeatherBar.png

I can't recall where I found this, somewhere in forums off one of the links off the FG page.

Random Weather Module (https://supernovagaming.com/~mrh/DnD/FG/RandomWeather.mod)

Weather Tokens (https://supernovagaming.com/~mrh/DnD/FG/Weather.zip)

richvalle
January 20th, 2006, 16:12
Yes! That looks like it!

Thanks,

rv