Building a RP program

[Roomghost]

So, I started building a program around the idea of a chat room with a few twists.

1. It built to specifically for Roleplaying
2 I plan to have the feature of saving the RP to a document such as a txt file for sharing with other people.

I need more feature ideas and such, so if you would like to throw some to me that you would like to see in this sort of thing, let me know!

[Gwazi Magnum]

Sounds interesting.

But if it's chat I'm assuming everyone is on at once?
If so I'd add some sort of feature preventing everyone from typing at once and constantly Ninjaing one another.

[Roomghost]

Well, its like private chat. I kind of imagined it like you start a group and everyone would go into that persons chat and build the story you know?

But I will add in a min wait before a message can be sent again

[Jorick]

Here's a list of features I think would be useful for such a program.

Variety of chat types. You could have public group, private group, and private one on one chats and all would see use, I'm sure.

Chat moderation tools. Make it so the creator of the chat room is its owner and has control over various options (setting a password, muting/kicking/banning people, etc.), and allow them to set other people as moderators for the room as well, with varying permission levels. One of these chat options could allow them to set a delay like Magic Magnum suggested, or they could stick with the hectic mess of unlimited chat, since some people like that about real-time roleplaying.

Font customization options. People like to customize how their stuff looks, so give them different fonts, colors, sizes, and bold/italic/underlined options at a minimum.

User profiles. You should have something like what most chat programs have, where people can put whatever personal info they wanna share and an area in there for people to list their roleplaying interests and preferences. This ought to be accessible both by clicking on a user's name and by searching for them through some function of the program.

Character profiles. If it's for RP, you're gonna want to give people an area to describe their characters. The awesome ideal way to do it would be so users write up whatever character profiles that anyone can look at by going to their user profile, and when people are using the chat program they can choose one of their character profiles to use at that time; ideally this would change their displayed name to something designated in the character profile (say a 'Display Name' line under the character name line) and clicking on their display name ought to direct other users to their character profile page. Could be fine as just a section of the user profile instead of the fancy stuff with the name change and all, but I'm sure people would enjoy the extra touch added by the character profile swapping.

Friends list. If the program draws a lot of use rather than just a few people from this site, it'd be nice to allow people to have a friends list so they can see whenever people they enjoyed roleplaying with come online, plus have a way to open a chat with them with the press of a button.

[Roomghost]

Good points, I will keep these in mind as i develop

[Nemaisare]

That delay feature is a good one, or I dunno how it's done, but if there's some way to notify others that someone else is typing, that way you know there might be a reply coming that you'd be breaking into... It'd work on a polite chat. :P Or if there's four or less people rping together.

I guess just like skype or AIM has when the other person is typing, it lets you know.

[Roomghost]

Simple enough, will add!

[Kidd]

Maybe an optional "post order" function and a notification (with visual and/or audio alerts) that lets you know when it's your turn to post. Optional because it's obviously not necessary for one and ones and even in group RPs, post order isn't always a big deal. But I personally like having an established order so no one gets left behind.

[Roomghost]

hmm.. So how would I set that up? Like an admin defined order or what?

[Kidd]

That's a good idea. And maybe you already plan to include a user list, but this would make the user list customizable, I suppose.

[Roomghost]

Will do, I'll have a prototype with barebones basic features by saturday ready(:

[Kidd]

Sweet, can't wait!

[Roomghost]

It won't have many features yet, but i do plan to have the chat working.