Speaking Icons
 

With the new speaking Icons, and them showing in the Group Window, comes the question I have:

Can we make these icons (such as in the Group window) only show up when someone is speaking? Rather than just go from white to green, where they are always displaying?

Still not having tested this, thanks for the info that they go from white to green. I would very much like to show them only when someone speaks as well (do they have any other function, e.g. does clicking them bring up a menu you would need?).

Unfortunately I can't think of any way to get this done - you could probably use OnShow events to check their color and only show when green, but currently I can't think of a way to hide them again once they have been green for the first time (for lack of an event triggering another color check at that time).

Yes, clicking the icon brings up the Mute/Volume pop-up to adjust each individual's volume.
But this can also be easily found in the voice chat window, where it lists everyone in the current voice chat.

I was hoping that "idle" and "speaking" were two different icons, so that I could just modify the DDS file, but this was not the case.

I haven't touched it beyond doing a copy/paste into a mod to make it "current", but SoE seems to be using a set of display semantics that would make hiding the icon when people are not talking a semi-poor idea.

From what I have seen it has the following appearances:
Visible-green - when someone is talking
Visible-gray - when someone is in channel but not active
Visible-small - a pressed indication when clicking it to set volume
Visible-white - I don't think this is used for an indication, but is the default icon when you force visibility of the element. Maybe mouse-hover looks like this... this is all off of memory.
NonVisible - When the player is not in your voice channel

This last one seems to be a problem. Desires in this thread indicate they want the icon to be invisible when not talking, but SoE uses that semantic for a non-voice user. I think it would be rather bad to not know about this state.

Besides that I'm currently thinking that maybe I can apply the DynamicData to the player name instead of adding the icon.

If that works then if the player isn't in the group voice channel their name will be hid :P Now I know I am a little strange (ok not a little) but that don't seem like a good idea to me. Guess you could counter it with filters or OnHide=!Visible

Or just put two text elements on top of each other?

Would that interfere with group leader text coloring, and maybe there's another way around that as well.

Yes of course - I didn't intend blanking raid members out, duh.

Actually I thought about using two of the voice DD elements, one with OnHide=!Visible, the other one with a size=0,0 so you don't see it, but so you can grab the OnShow, OnHide events from it. E.g. you could deactivate the DD from the player name element OnHide of the other one and set your own coloring to it to indicate someone not being in a channel.

That's one of the questions, would the DD or the hardcoding prevail. I have no idea. ;)