Game chat

[a_bertrand]

My own chat experience history:

Since I own and run a game, my game contains a chat. I first did it as it was basically the only player interaction I was offering (plus the in game email system and a market place). But soon those chats started the be more and more used, and we had to offer a separated window screen to host a community chat which could be accessed independently from where you was in the game.

At that point requests for more and more features started to flood, like handling whispers, actions (/me), multiple channels, chat bot, and more. Things never stopped... and the old poor chat wasn't really designed to be expanded that much.

End of last year, I started from a suggestion of Kyle (from Ipocalypse) a prototype of a web IRC client (like mibbit), and you saw the results (http://www.wsirc.com). However I was still not really keen to move from my own chat to an IRC server. The main reasons where that due to the game design you could have multiple chat window open, and IRC normally don't accept multiple connections with a single nick name. Also, the common rules which make you owner and operator of a channel when you create a new channel are not acceptable for my game. So, for a while we stayed yet more with the our old chat.

A couple of weeks ago, players started to express themselves saying that the old chat was starting to be hard to follow, too many discussions, whispers where starting to be hard to follow (as they where somehow mixed in to the channel), and they wanted to create their own channels (for example for clans or others).

The move:

At this point, I simply started to wonder what I could do, as I didn't wanted to replicate the work done on wsirc, and yet I didn't wanted those constraints from the IRC servers. I finally took the road to try to implement myself an IRC server (the code to make the IRC network run), and implement some special rules which would match my needs. Like having the player helpers (PH => our mods) being half-op of the channels, and admin being op of all channels. Allowing people to create channels but those channels would never belong to them. Being able to connect multiple times with the same nick, force usage of game accounts (until you identify yourself you will not be able to do anything), prevent the change of nick names, and more.

This took me a whole week (plus a few days to squash the last bugs), and it consists of 2500 lines of C# code. This new service runs as any other Linux demon on my server, and accept both request from wsirc as well as from any other IRC clients.

Results:

Since we made our move, I can tell you that at first the players wasn't really happy, (as most of the big changes in the game), but after a while they started to appreciate the new features, like ability to script, faster feedback, multiple channels inside tabs, possibility to use an IRC client, and more. It was definitively an hard work, but was needed, and now chat is even more active than before. On the other side, it pushed me to improve wsirc, to include some missing pieces, and fix some bugs.

So if you have experiences with chat yourself, please share / comment or ask any questions (pertinent).