|
Regarding combat: Using pronouns would make things really confusing if there was more than 1 attacker and more than 1 attackee. How would everyone know which "him" is doing which damage? Better to leave it a little clunky and avoid the confusion.
As for including communications (talking) within emotes, I prefer those games which provide the reverse: including emotes with communications. That gives the coder more flexibility in coded language development. If your game has coded languages, then bypassing that code by including quotations in emotes would have to be against the rules. It isn't a difficult rule to follow as long as you have the coded ability to include emoting in talking. So:
emote waves at @man, saying, "Hello there!"
would be replaced with
tell man (waving at @man) Hello there!
That way, if an onlooker doesn't speak that language, he'll end up seeing something like:
Waving at the man, the woman says something.
and everyone who does understand the language would see:
Waving at the man, the woman says, "Hello there!"
Of course all of that is a matter of trust between staff and players; if your playerbase isn't trustworthy to maintain the integrity of the tools provided to them, you're better off not having a detailed emoting system at all and just sticking with canned socials.
To answer Mal's question directly: In Armageddon at least, it's left clunky. You write the emote out similarly to how you would use act in Inferno, except with the added benefit of dynamic symbols. So in Inferno, Niclas' player might type:
act waves at the group, his eyes sparkling with mirth as he reaches for his gem-studded neuvaldian dagger and says, "Spencer, ladies, gents, everyone else".
He is writing in the third person, as if Niclas was someone else. The same would happen in the dynamic emote (or in this case, the dynamic say-emote):
say (to @spencer, with a wave at the group, his eyes sparkling with mirth as he reaches for @dagger) Spencer, ladies, gents, everyone else.
So if there's a misalen in the crowd and he doesn't speak common, he will see only:
To Spencer, with a wave to the group, his eyes sparkling with mirth as he reaches for his gem-studded neuvaldian dagger, Niclas says something in an unknown language.
Maybe if the misalen has only 2 ranks of common, he might hear something like:
....Spen--, la----- g----, -ver--n- e-s-."
or even random letters replacing the correct ones, until his skill is good enough to understand the whole thing.
|