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.
Poll
