ThePaul-T
commented
2 months ago We're working towards fixing the purple names (which would need fixed to even do what you're suggesting anyway) and once that is fixed, I personally, believe it is enough. The current issues are caused by the modpacks on CurseForge not having a project id to be mapped back.
People likely won't agree, but talking is almost the literal purpose of the mod, I am trying to walk a fine line between giving hints but not giving away the information people should ask and communicate for.
Guswut
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I'm always frustrated when people don't know the modpack I'm using or I don't know the modpack they're using. This is compounded by modpacks from different launchers not showing purple-same-modpack coloring.
Describe the solution you'd like
What I'd suggest would be an icon added to the left of a username. I have prototyped this up using emojis from the Emojiful mod, and G.I.M.P., so please pardon it not looking all that good (and pardon if I didn't use the right icon for a user, that's a skill issue on my part, haha), but hopefully this gives an idea of what I mean:
The specific icons likely would be best being something that aren't emojis and instead are either decided by the pack creator, or maybe someone at MineTogether adds a new icon whenever a pack becomes popular enough to warrant it. I don't think there is a good way to automate this although maybe grabbing the modpack's default image is a start (and make a custom image for popular packs)? That could be fairly dangerous if CurseForge/FTB/etc don't audit their images because obscene images could technically go through, but reporting people with obscene images could allow some level of oversight there.
There would ideally need to be a way to tell MineTogether that you're playing a specific pack, so ideally the controls for what pack you are playing would be moved into the gear config menu. This would open up the possibility that people could change this, but I don't think that is really much of an issue because all it does is make it look like they're using a different pack and get a different icon. I could potentially see this being abused if people like a specific icon more (maybe enough to make a pack just to have that icon).
Alternatively, you could allow people to use custom icons via emojis or whatnot, but that defeats the purpose of this being useful for seeing what pack people are on.
In addition or alternatively, having the modpack name in the context menu when you click/right click a username could work well to either compliment or replace this functionality. Another prototype, hopefully not as horrible this time!:
It'd likely make sense to make the text larger, or another color/different colored background, or maybe add "modpack: " before it perhaps, but it might just work as-is. If the icon feature works out, then it might be nice to add the icon here, either small in front of it like the username, or larger and above it which would allow for a larger image to make it both easier to view and to make people able to more easily understand what each icon is if needed.
I don't think this has much of any downsides besides needing to map modpack names to their internal MineTogether IDs, but I assume that is likely already being done in some way or another.
Describe alternatives you've considered
Communicating with people is the only real alternative here, and that does work although this would drastically cut down on how many times people end up confused because of different modpacks or even just need to ask which modpack they're playing.
Additional context
Hopefully this isn't too big of an enhancement request but it would likely be fairly involved. Maybe just the modpack name in the context menu popup is enough, although having the icons would be really nice!