Knights and Merchants.net Forum

Just kidding!

Okay, seriously now: There is an ongoing troll-joke that has been around for a while. It involves a player making a "console message" appear. For example, I can type in "Ben has quit" along with enough spaces to make it appear as if it was real. With minimal practice, this can be a fun joke to play on your friends...but it's just a silly design flaw (no offense, Lewn&Krom ). Even players with knolwege of the joke can be taken for surprise, sometimes. For example: the other idea I was playing with my friends on TeamSpeak, and I jokingly used this trick. Unfortunately, not everyone got the joke, and after several quits, we had to re-host

This seriously should be fixed. In my opinion, the less players are capable of trolling each other, the better. I understand that this thread may teach others about this, but I hope that it will serve them as a warning, and not as a tool for destruction (I make it sound so bad, lol).

Here is an image of this troll-joke in use:



You can even do it in a lobby:

How do you suggest we fix it? As far as I remember this is possible in other games too.

This will become harder once we have translated network system messages, since some people will see your message in the wrong language

Change the text color to grey or something.

Maybe strip leading whitespaces?

Btw. there are some more graphical glitches in the text mode which I am excessively abusing. When you meet me, you'll see. But nothing of that does affect the game or other players, it's just the display of the text.

Changing the font colour won't work at the moment because currently we let people use colour markup in their messages ([$BBGGRR]text[]). We could change that though, there's no reason to let people use colour I guess.

Stripping whitespace won't work because you can always write an actual message with the right width (that's harder though).

@Siegfried: I'd be interested to hear about these glitches, I probably won't encounter you online because I don't play very often so if you could PM them to me or post them here I'd appreciate it.

OK, I see the problem. But for this case, you still could put some whitespaces after a line break.
I mean, if you replace the automatic \n with \n\t for chat messages, you could distinguish them from system messages.

Otherwise you could use the brute force method and change the sound for system messages. I remember that you tried a different sound some times ago and then discarded it. Take that for system messages and leave the current sound for chat messages only.

Haha this is a nice thing. When we play with the "TS ""known""" guys, we often know that its a joke, but one time someone of us made this joke in the official release )with 5 other unknown gamers and they left the game and said: "Fast rehost" So this joke isnt everytime that funny, espacialy from the view of the players, who don´t know that sth like that is possible.

However this will be the best..
...I mean than Ben would need to post the message in 7 different languages,which isnt possible :

There's no use letting the player choose a font color in-game..

Copied directly from changelog of another game..

I think using text decoration will be the easiest way (italics, for example).

Italics and other decorations aren't possible with KaM fonts because they're raster (bitmap fonts). I think indenting is probably best because it makes it very obvious. Colour might still confuse people especially because system messages were white in the past.

Indenting sounds best to me too. Good idea

I'm not sure we should remove colortagging from players message. They do no harm.

Done