Free Flow Chat, what is it _really_ about? [Blog Post]

[Scotland]

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Habbo is a social platform. At the very core of our world are Rooms and Chat. We have recently decided to take a look at these features with the goal of unlocking new possibilities for Habbos to interact and have fun. We feel our first step into this challenging area of development went well. We were able to bring new room layouts, stacking tools, and more intuitive navigation. Many more possibilities will follow.

Working on such core features is never easy and we understand that it can be a bit scary when things change. For that reason, we’d like to explain exactly what we’re doing now with the chat and why.

First, let’s define the problem. The chat system currently works by placing one speech bubble on each line and varying length of the bubble based on the amount of text. This works well in situations where the entire room is having a single conversation. However, in many rooms the layout provides various seating areas and hangouts. Habbos often gather in these hangouts to form groups and chat, but their speech winds up as part of the whole room conversation rather than allowing supporting this natural tendency toward small to medium sized groups.

Enter the Free Flow Chat: Non-overlapping bubbles can now pass each other and avatars talking in one position for a longer time get their chat pulled together into a single column. Your group of friends get your own column, while the group next door gets theirs, and the room owner gets to decide how wide these columns are and how fast they scroll up, and design their room accordingly!



Example: If you go to a dedicated area of a large room like a diner with your friends and sit down at a table, you can’t really casually talk without interruption if the room is busy with lots of chat already. We believe room building skills and your avatar’s position should affect the range of possible socializing actions in more intricate ways than just the crude hearing-range implementation Habbo has now. We want to offer the room builders more than just furni to control the atmosphere of their rooms, hence the possibility to also control the way the chat flows.

And now for the apology: The old chat was great in many occasions and should still be available (in pixel perfect form)! We believed the choice of chat style should be made by the owner of the room since it requires users to navigate a bit differently to fully appreciate the benefits. However, chat is such a personal experience that the choice should rest with individuals as well. For this reason, we will be adding individual option to choose your chat style as well as the alternative to take the room’s default setting.

If you’d like to follow along with the progress, the Free Flow Beta group will be open for everyone to opt-in. A lot of people enjoyed the new model, and we will offer them the possibility to take it to use everywhere in the hotel while we work to emulate the old chat perfectly while still giving you the improvements of the new: Chat history view spanning multiple rooms with time-stamps, instant response to room panning, pointers moving while you walk, fabulous-looking chat styles, and more still to come!

http://blog.habbo.com/2013/06/12/fre...really_-about/

[Michael]

Oh dammit, you beat me to it I get email notifications on that blog!

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I like how they have decided to allow us to have a individual option on the chat style/layout. It does make more sense now i've had a read of this of why they have chosen to change the chat.

[Scotland]

Oh dammit, you beat me to it I get email notifications on that blog!

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I like how they have decided to allow us to have a individual option on the chat style/layout. It does make more sense now i've had a read of this of why they have chosen to change the chat.

Haha, my twitter auto posts it. - so i saw it
Yeah, i prefer new chat anyway. To me much neater, but when people abuse it its... anoying.

[e5]

So they're giving us the choice of free-flow and normal? I think we should get a personal choice aswell as to what we wish to see!

[Red]

However, chat is such a personal experience that the choice should rest with individuals as well. For this reason, we will be adding individual option to choose your chat style as well as the alternative to take the room’s default setting.

Never going to like the new chat system, and those small bubbles are impractical cause it will only go up the room quicker. :S I am glad they recognise that it should be the individuals choice though. For me it should deffo be the individual and not the room owner of how they want their chat to be displayed. Now I need an option to disable hideous coloured chat bubbles. Not really looking forward to any updates regarding this!

[MKR&*42]

For this reason, we will be adding individual option to choose your chat style as well

Thank god.

[Yawn]

i guess wat they r trying 2 do makes sense but it rly isnt a big deal?? the chat has never been a problem we read around wat other ppl r saying and its not an issue having to do that. however this new chat was impossible to use and was a problem.

just leave it as it is and save all the messing about :S if they make the style of chat an option then w/e i dont care as long as it isnt forced on us but it clearly didnt work. all the new fonts were confusing, the bubbles didnt run smoothly and whole bits of chat disappeared up the screen b4 u could even read it..

[Red]

'emulate the old chat perfectly' ugh what are they going to do to it???????? leave it alone :@@@

[Daltron]

yeah it doesn't make sense of all things they could have attempted to fix up on Habbo they do this...

---------- Post added 12-06-2013 at 11:20 PM ----------

tbh sulake don't fix what aint broken -.-

[Star-Fighter]

So they're giving us the option to choose the chat BOTH in our avatar settings as well as room settings, or did I misunderstand something? Could this be more of a hassle really?

If they really want these "small groups of people who gather in different parts of a room" to have a more fluent chat, they could just simply reduce the range/area of the other chat bubbles, as in, from what distance they can be seen. Shout is whole room and whisper to one person only, but the normal "say" area could be reduced so it wouldn't interrupt ongoing discussions. However, I have never had any problems with the chat.

Change is good and I think something could be done with chat, just not this free flow thing.