The Hello Hud (greeter for hosts, hostesses, and you) Version 1.23

We feel that being greeted by a machine greeter is worse than no greeting at all. What hosts need is a way to greet people automatically so that it looks just like a normal greeting in local chat -- in white text, not the green or brown text that is obviously from a machine.

We have your solution -- a machine-assisted greeting that is delivered in your normal white local chat text! It comes with a few limitations, but it's a really unique product in that it's hard to tell that you are using it at all.

Wear The Hello Hud, and avatars that come within your 20 meter local chat distance will be entered into a "hello queue". When your "hello queue" has avatars in it, the Next Avatar button on the hud will start flashing red.

Click that Next Avatar flashing button and a prompt will allow your avatar to say "Hi XXXX!" or "wb XXXX!" in local chat. It will try to say that avatar's first name, translating that first name from SPECIAL characters to TYPEABLE characters so that it looks like a real reply you would type to them.

However, because some people's display names can be complicated (& there are THOUSANDS of possible special characters in people's names), the algorithm can easily get their first name wrong. You can always ignore the proposed reply, and instead cut and paste the raw avatar display name from the prompt into local chat, and edit it to get the first name right.

If you have seen the avatar before since you turned on the hud, like if people have left and come back or crashed and came back, then the proposed reply will be "wb XXXX" instead of "hi XXXX".

When you have said hello to all the avatars in your hello queue then the Next Avatar button will stop flashing red. If you want to dump all the avatars that are in your hello queue without saying hello, then press the Clear Queue button. Maybe you might use this button if you were AFK for a while and are embarrassed to say hi to people after that much time has elapsed. You can just dump the queue but still have the avatar history to welcome people back if they leave and come back.

Note that to prevent running out of script memory, your hello queue won't be allowed to exceed 20 avatars.

If you turn on the hud while standing in a crowd of avatars or if you walk into a crowd of avatars, everyone around you will be loaded into the hello queue. In that case you might want to Clear Queue so that only new arrivals to the crowd will go into your hello queue.

If an avatar is no longer in your sim by the time you click the Next Avatar button, the hud will skip over them instead of prompting you to greet somebody that isn't there. That means that if you only have one avatar in your hello queue and that avatar has left the sim when you clicked the Next Avatar button, nothing will happen except the flashing red will stop. So don't be alarmed if that happens sometimes.

You can change the greeting with the Set Greeting button, like from "Hi to "Hello" or "Howdy", but it can't be too long because there is a character limit on delivering your message in white text. The avatar's first name, plus your additional greeting text, can be 24 characters max. If your reply combined with the avatar first name is too long then it could get cut off. In fact "welcome back" is probably too long so we'd recommend using "hi again" or "wb". If the message is being chopped off, you will notice this in your prompt, so you can always cut and paste the raw avatar name to craft your own reply in local chat instead of using the auto-reply.

The hud keeps track of all the avatars that you have seen since you turned the hud on, and uses this history to determine whether you haven't seen an avatar before (and so would say "hi") or if you have seen them before (and so would say "wb"). To clear that past avatar history, just turn the hud off and on again with the off/on button. Hosts would probably want to do this when they start their set, although the hud clears the avatar history automatically when it's detached and re-attached.

If you want a longer range than 20 meters on the hud (maybe your club uses chat extenders) then let us know and we'll give you a version with whatever range you want. We kept the hud simple by not having a range option, and there is no way for the hud to shout anyway to reach listeners more than 20 meters away -- you'd need to use a chat extender to do that.

Please contact Minji (minianne) or Indi (indigo.somerset) if you have any questions or problems.

Note that the hud can be resized.

Copy, modify (except the scripts), no-transfer.