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Radio Communication


TheStoryteller

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Radio Communication


Orientation: Multiplayer


TL;DR: Incorporation of hand/stationary radios within the game. 


 


The incorporation of hand or stationary radios into the game would add a new level of communication and depth on servers. Having a hand radio, or setting up a stationary radio in your home would allow you to speak with players or NPCs on opposite sides of the map. You could browse frequencies, and stumble upon a distress call repeating every 2 minutes, or come across another player willing to trade goods for food. Maybe, even, kidnap a player, and bribe his friends over the radio, ensuring that you’re in a safe position while making your demands. This could also bring another new item into the game: the map. This could come in the form of a travel brochure, or a dedicated map of the city/town you are in, and could be used in conjunction with the radio to plot locations, player-made shelters, meet-up points, or simply any location you want to go/have been.


 


For example: Player 1 – we’ll call him Will – gets trapped in his home by a horde of savage face eating neighbors. Luckily, Will just installed this fancy new radio system in his living room – no wonder the neighbors are jealous – and can now call out (or set up a pre-recorded – self repeating – message), “I live down the street from Jerry’s Diner,” or “I live at coordinates 23, -243.” Player 2, Ted, happened to be listening on the same frequency Will uses, and pulls up his map alongside his radio. He then finds Jerry’s Diner, or the coordinates previously stated on his map, and marks there with a pen.


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I like the look of the mod, but how do you tell who's talking? Wouldn't someone have to prefix their name to each transmission so you knew who it was?

Could you tell who's talking on a random walkie-talkie that you find?

Exactly

*folds arms in a smugly manner*

Yeah, they'd have to, I guess

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I like the look of the mod, but how do you tell who's talking? Wouldn't someone have to prefix their name to each transmission so you knew who it was?

Could you tell who's talking on a random walkie-talkie that you find?

Exactly

*folds arms in a smugly manner*

Yeah, they'd have to, I guess

 

 

I just think otherwise it would devolve into:

 

"At the camp."

"That you Jerry?"

"No it's Mike."

"Well I'm at Spiffo's."

"Jerry?"

"Bill."

"Just saw a zombie down the road."

"Bill?"

"No it's Mike again."

 

:P

 

Obviously you would have to know them first of course, not saying you should recognise a randomners voice.

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I like the look of the mod, but how do you tell who's talking? Wouldn't someone have to prefix their name to each transmission so you knew who it was?

Could you tell who's talking on a random walkie-talkie that you find?

Exactly

*folds arms in a smugly manner*

Yeah, they'd have to, I guess

 

 

I just think otherwise it would devolve into:

 

"At the camp."

"That you Jerry?"

"No it's Mike."

"Well I'm at Spiffo's."

"Jerry?"

"Bill."

"Just saw a zombie down the road."

"Bill?"

"No it's Mike again."

 

:P

 

Obviously you would have to know them first of course, not saying you should recognise a randomners voice.

 

I think, the simplest way to resolve this without resorting to "Mike: At the camp." and such, is by having players customize their text, so that they could choose the color, maybe italics, maybe bold. Perhaps, even between some fonts. This way, if a person knows someone, they can recognize their "voice" due to the text coming from the walkie-talkie. :)

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even if someone would go with pink comic sans in italics, someone could mimic that and lure the friends of pink-comicsans-italics-dude somewhere to trap and kill.

random colours and signals that have to be talked about before are a basic start I guess. keeping it fair for everyone for the good and the bad. there will be lots of trolling anyhow with stuff like this

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even if someone would go with pink comic sans in italics, someone could mimic that and lure the friends of pink-comicsans-italics-dude somewhere to trap and kill.

random colours and signals that have to be talked about before are a basic start I guess. keeping it fair for everyone for the good and the bad. there will be lots of trolling anyhow with stuff like this

 

 

Either that, or have them do what the stereotypical users of walkie-talkies do in movies: use callsigns and include them in their messages.

Mild pain in the ass, but hey.

Perhaps, trying to use specific colors is a bit too simple, and it may come to either; just using the names in front of the text, or having the ability to set allies. For example, right clicking on someone, and setting them to friend/ally/acquaintance, and therefore giving them a specific color code, or symbol before their name.

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Ultimate spam machine D:

?

 

Placing around 20 and then just spamming words and filling up the screen.

 

 

Impossibruh! the system has smart detection. So if you stand near multiple machines viable for transmitting it will check frequency and transmitrange amongst other things. For each frequency the machine with the longest transmitrange is selected to do the actual transmission, eleminating spam problem.

 

I like the look of the mod, but how do you tell who's talking? Wouldn't someone have to prefix their name to each transmission so you knew who it was?

 

As for the who's who, let me dispense how system works right now:

The game already assigns different random chat colors for each player normally. However what ive found is that for now it does this at random on each client and server. So first thing mod does is syncing the chatcolors of clients with that of server. Secondly it will save the chatcolors for a user on server, so in case of server reboot, death, reconnect etc you will remain having your own chatcolor unless the world resets totally.

The machine's simply transmit and display chatter with the appropiate chat color for the sender's voice (the color is saved inside the message packet).

 

Ive pondered about prefixing the chat automatically with names earlier on, but it didnt seem right... like Nasko mentioned if a person youve never met before transmits something over the waves it would be odd if youd knew their name right away :P

This way youd have to meet a person, get to learn how their voice "sounds" and then remember it like you would in real life. It may be possible for people to have colors that are almost the same by chance, but voices can sound the same too so. If it turns out to be problematic the system could always switch to assigning colors per table with preset distinctive colors i guess.

 

As for the things mentioned in other posts like people trying to take advantage of this system or trying to track down walkie talkie users, this could happen in real life :P The mod will try to simply supply the system as close as we can get it to real life mimic. How players use it will determine their success.

First rule imo should be: Never ever give away your location unless absolutly needed. Perhaps agree on codewords with mates for locations?

To prevent people listning in you could switch frequency every once in a while i guess via a pattern or based on code word.

 

 

Here's another little teaser thingy:

tapetest.png

 

As you can see, in image 11 the walkie talkie receives a message from the tape broadcasting on the stationary radio. It displays that message in my players chatcolor, this isnt a default setting or such, chat colors for a particular voice are even recorded on the tapes! :P

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  • 1 month later...

Maybe it could just be done as a chat log of it's own. Same way other games have ''raid'', ''group'' and ''guild'' channels, you could have radio frequencies on your chat box once you have your radio with you and turned on. In chat log, it would announce callsigns in the message like EnigmaGray said. That would make it easy to use the radio and make it valuable because it would let you access chat rooms that you wouldnt otherwise get to... This is maybe a bit different kind of idea but does this sound any good to you guys?

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Maybe they should work like normal walkie-talkies. If you want to communicate with a specific person or group, you just try to find a frequency and channel with no-one on it and communicate across that. That way, if someone was trolling on one channel or if the channel was too busy, you could just change frequencies.

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Maybe they should work like normal walkie-talkies. If you want to communicate with a specific person or group, you just try to find a frequency and channel with no-one on it and communicate across that. That way, if someone was trolling on one channel or if the channel was too busy, you could just change frequencies.

The mod Nasko and i teasered in this thread actually got finished some time ago:

 

http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/8943-apcom-ham-radios-walkie-talkies-spmp/

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