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FAQ Dev reason for restrictive text colors.

Wodiesan

LoMS Member
A few LoMSers asked about changing text colors on #LoMSGlobal so I went and looked for the dev response regarding the reason why it hasn't been implemented. Via Glaucom from Dec 2013:
The chat system is one of the few things left in the GUI that isn't part of the new UI system. Almost everything in the new UI system uses Scaleform and Flash, but there are some things that were very complicated to recreate in the new UI system, so they were done using bits and pieces of the old system. (Other examples include the dungeon anima well popup, and the minimap)

So the current UI modding tools, which are basically just Flash, won't work with these since they're done in the old UI system. However, the way that system works was changed enough in order to get it to play well with the new UI elements, that the old modding tools won't work.

But basically yeah, it's not as easy as flipping a switch. It requires a bit more work than that. It's still something I would like to see done, it's just that given the level of effort required there are other things right now that are a priority.

Meanwhile, if you want to mess with the text colors. Take a look at The Secret World\Data\Gui\Default\TextColors.xml. I don't think it will let you give custom channels different colors, but it may let you change colors of some of the already existing channels.

https://forums.thesecretworld.com/showthread.php?75953-Chat-Channel-Colors/page2
I wouldn't be surprised if those same reasons are responsible for the lack of updates on chat for Legends. I do remember another post where it's elaborated upon a bit more, but I can't seem to locate it.
 
what an unfortunate missed oppurtunity. now i can't prank people telling them that their accoutns will be closed using fancy colored text to trick and decieve them....
 
It's a bad excuse. Amounts to "We don't want to recompile this to work."

My theory is, and this based in a very low quality knowledge of coding and the inner works of a studio, that over the years, with so many ppl being fired and moved from the project, the original coders for some of the engine systems are gone and left little to no documentation.

One would think that a decent coder can just skim through it and "fix it" but fact is, most engines (and this one is not the best engine at all) have tons of inter-dependencies so, might not be that easy (if even possible) to fix something without completely rewriting it. We know that Funcom (The Secret World team to be more specific) is a very small team for quite some time.
Although I agree that stuff needs fixing and that a strong effort should be applied towards that, they might just miss the manpower for such. It's kinda sad to think about it since so much of a game's systems can lead to either retention or players leaving.
Sure, chat issues are bad but we all can agree that it's more of an annoyance than anything else. I'm guessing that's the path they decide to follow: Direct all their resources to the new (probably company forced) changes.

I'm not trying to be apologetic. Gosh no. I'm a firm defender of the Consumer responsibility to point out issues and "demand" fixes. After all, we all need the game to be as close to perfect as it can be so that we can enjoy it fully (and with a healthy population, since that's a big part of the enjoyment). I'm just sharing my theory for the lack of obvious problems that have been around for ~5 years now and get no attention.
 
I agree with Ahkronn. I work in systems/apps documentation: my experience is idocumentation is generally poor to non-existent, nterdependencies are a nightmare and the number of man/hours required to to fix a, As Ahkronn says, minor annoyance, is most probably not cost-efficient.

That said, I've seen other chat systems in well established modern games that are a lot worse, v.g. ESO - what it would be needed is a chat system's API that allowed for modding, and the community would probably put together an add-on or two, as it has done for other things
 
I'm a coder (and have been professionally for 20 years, and as a self-taught amature since I was 7 years old) and this sort of thing is trivial. Clearly color support is already built in or else Cabal text wouldn't be green. They would just need to allow an ini file to define the colors, and load then into a custom color variable that gets used on certain channels. Hell, they don't even need a GUI.. I'm sure someone would whip one up that creates the ini file.

(While they're in there, probably not hard to allow that same ini file to define the size of the font that gets loaded too.)


It's not that it's HARD to do, it's that they don't want to expend the energy to do so. On this we agree. I still think it's a lousy excuse. :)
 
One would think that a decent coder can just skim through it and "fix it" but fact is, most engines (and this one is not the best engine at all) have tons of inter-dependencies so, might not be that easy (if even possible) to fix something without completely rewriting it.
pljxylT.gif
 
(While they're in there, probably not hard to allow that same ini file to define the size of the font that gets loaded too.)
FYI, there is a way to define font size. Check out this Step by Step increasing font size post. There are some things that are still unaffected such as mission logs but it does handle chat and some other things like loading screen fonts. I've found this particularly useful when running higher res.
 
My theory is, and this based in a very low quality knowledge of coding and the inner works of a studio, that over the years, with so many ppl being fired and moved from the project, the original coders for some of the engine systems are gone and left little to no documentation.

One would think that a decent coder can just skim through it and "fix it" but fact is, most engines (and this one is not the best engine at all) have tons of inter-dependencies so, might not be that easy (if even possible) to fix something without completely rewriting it. We know that Funcom (The Secret World team to be more specific) is a very small team for quite some time.
Although I agree that stuff needs fixing and that a strong effort should be applied towards that, they might just miss the manpower for such. It's kinda sad to think about it since so much of a game's systems can lead to either retention or players leaving.
Sure, chat issues are bad but we all can agree that it's more of an annoyance than anything else. I'm guessing that's the path they decide to follow: Direct all their resources to the new (probably company forced) changes.

I'm not trying to be apologetic. Gosh no. I'm a firm defender of the Consumer responsibility to point out issues and "demand" fixes. After all, we all need the game to be as close to perfect as it can be so that we can enjoy it fully (and with a healthy population, since that's a big part of the enjoyment). I'm just sharing my theory for the lack of obvious problems that have been around for ~5 years now and get no attention.

I remember a story I heard from an ex-Paragon dev. Someone fixed a small line of code and it inadvertently affected the gravity in the entire game. For an entire week, toons were being knocked half-way across a zone because gravity didn't work correctly. Sometimes when code is old and complex, easy fixes cause more problems than they solve.
 
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