ID:112546
 
Keywords: chat, relay, terulia, trc
http://www.byond.com/developer/Gakumerasara/TRC

No one's using it. What gives?

Is it too hard to understand?
Are you opposed to using a library?
Is it lacking some key feature that you want?
Do you not want your players "distracted" by the outside world?

I didn't create TRC as a conversation piece.
Let me know what you want added/changed/removed.
It's not called Chatters.
I think you just need to actively pursue others to use it and advertise it more. BYOND seems like it just isn't the kind of community to jump on these things on its own until it's familiar with it.
I've never heard of it, till just now.
I'll implement it into one of the later releasable versions of my game, I think the reason is stated before:

You need to advertise way more, and tell the use of the library and such more often.
I just don't have a project yet that's worth using it in.
The name doesn't have enough pizzazz.
Forum_account wrote:
I just don't have a project yet that's worth using it in.

This
Owners aren't going to change the way their game operate just because you want them too. Instead, you should talk to specific developers that have popular games and ask them to prototype it. See if it gets picked up by mainstream games and then it'll get more publicity from an applicable standpoint.

I'm not sure if you've tried this yet, but I think if current owners are content with their means of chatting they aren't going to just try out your software from a blog post.
One of the main contributing factors might be that no other games have it, so there wouldn't be any other games to communicate with.
I have to say I love having TRC incorporated into Perdita, and I encourage others to use it as well. It's simple to set up and use and has the potential to attract new players to your game.
Seems pretty interesting. I might use it in my current game project.
Thanks for the feedback; I really appreciate it.
some quick comments/responses/questions/etc.:

Fugsnarf & Shadow813 & Odazler:
I see from your responses that my campaign to get the word out (promotion, video, and several 'blog posts) have largely failed. Perhaps rapid-fire, Twitter-type updates (limited in scope) are the way to go?

SuperAntx & Toadfish:
Feel free to suggest a new project title!

Odazler et al.:
Even if you don't have a game "ready" for TRC, it would help me to know whether you think you may want/need additional features. To see TRC in its current state (and to see it in use), the easiest way would be to log into FFO. (You don't need to create a character.)

Oasiscircle:
the Catch-22! However, this doesn't apply in certain cases; e.g. - TRC lends itself to server crosstalk, so any game with multiple servers could do well to implement TRC with the primary goal of letting its segregated players communicate (OOC/WSay) with each other.

Kalzar:
I don't expect everyone will decide to use TRC after looking into it. What confuses me is why no one's looking into it. You know... People sending me pages "How does [such-and-such] work exactly?" "What happens if I change this variable?" zero such inquiries. And yes, I have talked with several people about the specific benefits of TRC to their game(s); the only ones who have made any effort to implement TRC (that I am aware of) are those for whom I am currently hosting as per the most recent promotion.

National Guardsmen:
Perdita is a great example of how TRC can be implemented in a custom manner. As we'd discussed, seeing how you've implemented it in Perdita has given me ideas for the next round of website changes.

Anyway, thanks again for the feedback so far. If you have any additional comments, I'd love to hear them.
I'm kidding about the name, of course, but I'd like to see this being used more as well.
Who do you see using this, and why?
I'd consider adding it to A Miner Adventure because its largely played as single player so having chat unified across all servers might be nice, but cross-server chat seems like it just ups the potential for spam. People could spam you without connecting to your game so you can't stop them by pager banning them. What does TRC do about this? My guess is that you can do some filtering on the server, but would the game's server still be bombarded with chat messages?
Stephen:
TRC by itself would be particularly useful for single-player games (hard to build a community when your players can't communicate effectively), chat programs (vastly increased user base), and any games spread across multiple servers (obvious reasons). Single-server multiplayer games, especially those under development, would also benefit since TRC removes the restriction that you have to be where your friends are to talk with them. (so you can check out a new game without being completely disconnected, or even invite your buddies to join you via TRC.) The "level 2" TRC implementation would be to use the forums in addition.

In the past, BYOND devs had 2 options for forums: BYOND's member forums (with practically zero traffic but with the added benefit of Pager updates) or offsite forum hosting (e.g. InvisionFree). Offsite hosting is spiffy but creates a disconnect between your players, many of whom don't want to sign up for "yet another forum", and your forum users; most of your forum users (conservatively, up to 20% of your players) won't even know about your new post for several hours or whenever they happen to login. Using TRC w/ TFS means that any time there's action on your forum, everyone subscribed to the forum's channel will know about it within seconds. You can see how well this system works by watching users flock to new posts. TRC w/ TFS has broad applicability; those who might think twice about using it are those w/ large, established offsite forum communities. (That being said, the FFO community ditched its offsite forum, w/ >115k posts, and relocated to the new forums without any problems.)

Forum_account:
If you would, please log into FFO and try spamming TRC; I'm curious to see how effective it is for you. There are measures in place to throttle message rates, and I would be happy to tweak it if necessary. Since this update was added, I haven't heard any complaints about spam from FFO's TRC users. And yes, all messages have to go through the central server (and don't otherwise reach your players).

The most effective defense against problem users is to blacklist (ban) them via the forums. If you want a private forum/channel, you can implement the whitelist feature. Individual users can also block/ignore messages from problem users.
Gakumerasara wrote:
Perhaps rapid-fire, Twitter-type updates (limited in scope) are the way to go?

I don't know about that, but just a little more of pushing it out there would help. Even seeking out others yourself and trying to convince them to use it may get the ball rolling.
Forum_account wrote:
I just don't have a project yet that's worth using it in.

As long as the throttling or filtering isn't done by each game instance it sounds ok. I suppose I can include am option to toggle cross-server chat. I'm sure TRC supports it, but I don't need complex ignore lists and channel systems. I figure that unified chat will rarely be useful just because of how the game is (how often will someone be playing the game, have a question, bother to ask it with the hope that someone can answer it, and receive a good answer?), so I don't want it to be a burden on the users who won't really benefit from it.
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