ʙɪɢ․
Add an option to the chatbox keyboard that allows the player's inputs to update the chatbox bubble above their head in real-time instead of only after hitting "Send". This allows for chatbox users to participate in conversation more naturally.
A huge hurdle of participating in conversations using the chatbox is waiting for a message to be sent. It's difficult to keep people engaged in conversation with you when from their perspective there's just an ellipses above your head while sitting in silence. I want people to treat me like any other person talking, not an instant messaging app they can walk away from until I'm done typing.
Which is frustrating, because the majority of my response has already been typed out and finalized for quite a while by the time I hit 'send'.
It'd be nice if the person I'm talking to could read it while waiting for me to finish the rest!
While this applies to almost any message, a good example of this is someone might ask me a yes or no question and I'll want to answer with "yes,
but...
", which forces them to wait another minute or so in silence for me to finish my thought before they can hear my initial "yes". This latency in being able to hear what I have to say might not sound like much but it's very clear how this hurts certain social interactions when comparing it to real-time typing.
VRCTextboxOSC (an OSC chatbox input tool) has a setting that allows for this, and it's magical being able to truly
talk
to people as if my voice were the characters appearing in real-time above my head. It completely changes how people interact with me as a chatbox user.
There's problems with this though. I don't really want overlays of my desktop blocking people's faces while I type out a message. It's really frustrating having an overlay set up for this program that I can casually use at any time for long periods of time. VRChat's built-in keyboard is compact enough to feel unintrusive mid-conversation, and it's why I tend to find myself preferring it. It's very comfortable to use, which is why I'm making this post in the first place. I know that this is already technically possible, I've done it myself! I just really really wish I could do it natively in VRChat. The existing 3rd party implementation is too clunky to use on a day-to-day basis.
To be clear, I'm proposing and alternate mode that can be toggled on and off. The existing traditional "type message, hit send" method works for most people and has its use-cases. I just wish that 50% of the time I could get information out faster if I need to with a little "live typing/auto update" toggle.
Thanks for reading!