Simlish: the language the Sims speak. A garbled dialect to simulate english.
This will be considered a somwhat strange suggestion,however, I've seen it work in other online roleplaying resources and it greatly adds to the immersion of the game.
Imagine that when you create a character you can choose the gender and tone of voice you want respresenting your character. Its a simple drop-down box that allows you to "sample" the voice before applying it to your character. This basically chooses a directory on the local machine that is tied to that voice.
When you type in the chat window, depending on the line, a specific simlish sentence is spoken/mumbled. If you add an "emoticon" to the end of the line, it changes the simlish to be a different emphasis.
Examples:
Greetings, and well met!
- This would play a simlish sentence that is more of a exclimation.
Shall we move down the tunnel to our right?
- This would play a simlish sentence that is posed as a question.
I'd be more than happy to search that cleric of lolth :)
- By adding an emoticon on the end, it plays a simlish sentence that sounds somewhat happy.
It is hard to beleive that we have lost one of our own :(
- By adding a :( emoticon, the simlish is said in a sad tone.
You can see the applications for something like this. It would also be fairly easy to incorporate and would have many added benefits.
1) You would hear messages arrive.
2) You would recognize the speaker without looking at your screen.
3) It would be much more immersive to hear the "Dwarf" grumbling about something.
4) When a bard sings a song, you might actually hear humming or even a "la la la" song.
If nothing else, perhaps the developers of this excellent product would consider adding code to do this, however the community supplies sound sets. I would be more happy to donate my voice for many different sound sets.
I imagine each sound set consisting of 10 to 20 simlish sentences that would be built using *.wav or *.ogg (depending on the developers of course). Each sentence is its own file. I also imagine that you would not need to "stream" the audio between clients... just make sure the clients have distributed the files either manually or automatically.
I know, many of you are thinking that this may not add much to the game, however... I've seen it and it does indeed add to the atmosphere. Its also very simple to code. Its also very simple to test for the existence of the sound sets so as to bypass the use of them if they were not in existence.
Rizzen