Bunge Chat Issues

[Oplegoman]

Chat Issues - Bungee

We knew bungee would not be straight forward and there would be many problems that could arise from going down this path. When such problems arise, we want to ask the community their feelings on such issues as anything which is decided here does set the course for Sentinel and will affect everyone. Our issue has to do with our chats, so I shall outline the complexity of getting cross-server chatting working, our current progress on such chats and the issue at hand. We would like to end on some things we have thought about and would really like any input from yourselves on this issue.

Complexity of Bungee

Bungee in its pure form allows separate servers to allow players to flow between them and only players. All other data such a chat, inventory, and anything else is isolated to that server. This means we must find creative ways to allow this unsupported transfer of information between servers. The aspect which we feel is the most important is ensuring we can all chat with each other in the same way we currently do no matter what we are doing on the server.

Current progress

At this point we have Local, General, Senior Member and Staff Channels all sorted out and these do seem to be working reliably across all servers. Getting this far has been a major feat on our part as we are relying upon a plugin to manage this and all the complex network protocols involved.

Issues arise when we would be relying upon another plugin to determine who can see what chat, and we have two of them:

McMMO - Party Chats;

This would have party chats which only party member could see. The issue which arises from this is that McMMO was not built to be a completely integrated bungee plugins, so it stores a lot of its data within files which is very troublesome for any Bungee network. An example:

1.   I join a party in Fedgarida and warp to Horizon to find my myself no longer at a party!
2.   I leave a party in Horizon and warp to Kattalox only to find myself still in that party!

The basic premise is that there is no consistency between the files held for each server, we have thought of ways to ensure they consistent but such work well over our head. This would the sort of thing larger networks pay actually qualified developers to implement.

Towny - Town Chat, Nation Chat;

This one is the most frustrating problem that we have come across as we know that town chats are vitally important to everyone on sentinel, and we do come up against some issues similar to that of McMMO but the issues with towny are very much the same, town information is stored in files on a specific server in our case it would be Kattalox.
The issues we are having is that we would not be able to have town and nation chat outside the Kattalox server, which would be devastating, but we cannot find a workable solution to have it perfectly integrated across all servers.

Potential Workarounds

We have looked at Party and Friends plugin to replace parties for McMMO to allow players to have parties therefore fixing this issue rather quickly, it would be using /party so should not be an issue for anyone to get used to.
For towny this is much more complex, and we really do want to hear back from you and your potential ideas on this, if your ideas out as much as possible to allow us to see if those solutions would be feasible.

Our Solution:

Implementation of Party and Friend's Clans allows /Clan to replace town chat, it even comes with prefixes! Acts very much as a town chat with the leader managing the channel. Downside to this we would be losing nation chat which is very much disappointing.

We know this would not be ideal of a solution, but we have very much hit a wall and do not know how to progress.

[bugsy12]

I think Clan chat is an ok alternative! It'll be a bit of struggle to get used to it at first but I think we'll be ok with it .

Also allows players to not be in town chat if they don't want to be.
Added bonus, players in small towns/hermits could join into someone else's town chat.

[JoeArmageddon]

Gotta make some sacrifice for more amazing things p.s. clan chat sounds pretty fun to me!

[ItsThorn]

Would the idea of Clans and Towns be the same, albeit nation chat which would be left behind?
If so, agreed with the above, I think Clans would be a good alternative.

[The Carrot]

Would the idea of Clans and Towns be the same, albeit nation chat which would be left behind?
If so, agreed with the above, I think Clans would be a good alternative.

Yes and since clans are a distinct plugin from towny, 2 towns can opt to be part of the same clan. Or a nation can decide to become a clan by adding people from different towns all in 1 clan.
The original town and nation system will remain as is, only the chat functionalities would be discarded.
We are all ears for suggestions or plugins we might not have caught on.

[Nick The Builder]

Clan chat is a pretty good solution, there is probably going to be a continuous join and leave clan to change between clan chat? Idk but I think because different town members can join in a chat it's going to be fun. Someone can literally be an ambassador for a town now (or a spy > . >)

[Phenix106]

well the clan idea would be good but what happen to the town within a nation you said we would be able to add prefixes doe that mean we could potentially put our town name before our name so we know who is in what town between one nation. if so that could be a amazing alternative but if we cannot differentiate betweeen who is in what town in a single nation i think you should find a similar plugin like this Venture chat but its on spigot https://www.spigotmc.org/resources/venturechat.771

[LordTiger89]

Maybe you're in a town, where you won't share 'cause your only there for Nation or just another member.
General chat is enough for us all to be chating and being aware of all.
Nation can be 1 big Clan with all it's colonies, and no matter which town are you from, you can be where you wanna be with Clan's chat, big trouble solved my guess.
Also, you can leave and join Clan's chat, or maybe not if you're a common "badtongue" or rude in chatery business.
Mute wont be needed for Clans anymore haha.
Also, i'll try to look if there's a slightly small chance to get same ideal chat for towny/nation as it is right now.
Great job finding this excellent plugin for chat.
Keep up the hard work!
We love you all!!