The Mana World Forums

My proposal is to allow the creation of aliases for the chat system.. so that, for example, you type the following:
And then the next time you type "prty" in the chat box it will perform the command "/create My-party-name" which is much easy to type.
Or you can also put things like..
for quickly sending messages of text in the middle of a battle.

Also this would be a nice thing for performing some spells that might be too long to type in some situations. I do like the current magic system where you can cast by typing the name of the spell. I wouldn't like it to be replaced by mouse buttons that you have to click. But I think that having aliases in the game will improve the usability.
The usefulness of aliases will even increase if in the future more commands are added (currently there are some missing ones like /trade, /befriend...)

Also, if custom aliases are implemented there wouldn't be a need for duplicating names for the same command (currently /whisper /w and /msg are all the same thing and they are cluttering the /help list of commands), and some comands whose name is a bit unclear (like /create) could be longer to describe better what the command does (/create-party).

When calling "/alias" without parameters a list of the current aliases might be displayed.
Maybe a graphical interface showing alias/aliased text in a table would be nice, so that the users who don't like to use the command line interface can still use the aliases for spells and messages (which anyway they have to use the text for).

Fern wrote:

Code: Select all

/alias "spelly" "#really-long-and-hard-to-type-spell-name with-parameters"

I think the reason some spells are so long is because it takes longer to type and you might get hurt while you are typing it.

Good idea for commands, though.

robodoggy wrote:I think the reason some spells are so long is because it takes longer to type and you might get hurt while you are typing it.

You mean that it's like that on purpose?

But it's easy to press the up arrow key to redo a spell (you can type the spell wrong the first time to "load" it and correct it quickly when you want to cast it), so it's easily exploitable anyway. And probably someone will end up tweaking the client to make spell casting easier, and then the people who is using the official un-modified client will have an unfair disadvantage.

With alias supported you still have the option to use them or not (most spells won't really need aliases), this won't affect any other aspect of spell casting (there won't be spellbooks nor anything like that, the spells will still have to be discovered by investigation and socialization).

EDIT: The only thing affected is casting time (which is also affected by the player's typographic skills, not fair for slow typists).
If the game needs to have casting time then it shouldn't be done by complicating the spell name, but other way should be found, for example: after you type the magic word, the server checks how long ago was the last action done by the character... if this time is less than the default casting time of the spell then the spell fails and a message/effect is shown on the player to warn him that he did the spell too quickly).

Thats a good point

Fern wrote:If the game needs to have casting time then it shouldn't be done by complicating the spell name, but other way should be found, for example: after you type the magic word, the server checks how long ago was the last action done by the character... if this time is less than the default casting time of the spell then the spell fails and a message/effect is shown on the player to warn him that he did the spell too quickly).

Spells already have a spelldelay. For example, after casting lesser-heal, it takes half a second before you can cast another spell, and after casting summon-maggots (or any of the other existing summon spells), it takes 20 seconds before you can cast another spell.


I'm slowly working on making a spellbook that shortcuts buttons to user-defined invocations, amongst other functions. Since the client doesn't know what chat is a spell and what isn't, you could theoretically map any phrase to this.


---Freeyorp