[sldev] Inspiration from the mists of time.

[ordinal.malaprop at fastmail.fm]

It's interesting that text interfaces for action in a 3D world are  
still quite heavily involved in SL, even outside of communication.  
Firstly of course there's the fact that quite a bit of interactive  
content relies on you actually typing things. HUDs and dialog menus  
have done away with that to an extent I suppose, but chat-driven  
gadgets are still like little text-adventure NPCs... I personally like  
to have mine speaking in the first person, "you've attached me to the  
wrong place!" "I've run out of fuel! We're going to crash!".

Direct control of the avatar by text commands is also now around with  
the use of bots and other light clients. Command lists are quite  
limited but I could see some fairly sophisticated combination controls  
being developed, not just the sort of almost completely programmatic  
stuff that means you're a bot, but as automation and augmentation for  
human control, a "cyborg".

It makes quite a lot of sense in that people spend so much time  
talking in SL anyway, why not use that interface for other things? Not  
terribly good if you're using voice of course... unless you're using  
voice-recognition I suppose. (Any results from anyone testing this?  
I've not seen anything about.)

On 10 Mar 2008, at 17:14, Alan Grimes wrote:

> You could walk around and look at things to an extent with the mouse  
> but to do anything for real, you punched the space bar, which paused  
> the game and brought up a *text entry box*. That was the primary  
> means of controlling your d00d. You could enter just about any  
> imperative sentence and there were roughly even odds that the game  
> could parse your command and do something. Using this system, you  
> could had access to nearly the whole spectrum of human action and  
> expression. This allowed you not only to just talk to the NPCs, but  
> actually interrogate them about specific subjects.