FFXI Question (Chat System)

[Venkman]

Not sure who here has played it, but I had a question about FFXI, particularly it's chat system.

If I recall, you could type in it, but you could also have dialog through hierarchival menus (like Safe Chat in Club Penguin or the Voice Announcements in PS). However, in addition to this FFXI would translate the word/phrases to whatever language the other people used on their end. Like, if I used the menus to say "looking for group", it'd come up in Japanese as, well, however one says that in Japanese.

That the case or did I get it totally wrong?

[Trippy]

Yes, that's the auto-translate feature.

[Margalis]

Yeah, there are menus and also tab completion.

So if you type hel + tab you get a list of options like {Helldive} {Hello} etc etc. You choose one and on the other people's screens it shows up in their language.

I believe it is only English and Japanese but it works well. You end up with some pretty funny things too, like

{Bio} {Break} = Bio is a spell, together these mean bathroom

{fishing} {monster} = pulling

I've played in mixed groups and all Japanese groups without problem.

[Venkman]

Ah cool, thanks. Didn't know about the tabbed-completion thing. Sounds like a pretty good system.