Contact Sets

Owned by Chorazin Allen
Last updated: Dec 04, 2021
5 min read

Contact Sets in Kokua are ported from Firestorm based on code originally written by LordGregGreg Back and extended by Cinder Roxley (in particular, the integration with the People floater) as well as maintenance contributions from various members of the Firestorm Team. The Mini Map marker feature was originally implemented by Ansariel.

The Firestorm tutorial at https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/fs_contact_sets provides an introduction. The notes below cover the ways in which the port into Kokua has been changed or enhanced.

The first thing to note is that Kokua does not have a Contacts tab within its Conversations floater, thus the only place that Contact Sets appear is as a tab in the People floater.

 

As well as the Contact Set management a number of closely related functions have been ported or added, these include:-

  • The ability to apply coloured marks to avatars in the minimap (originally by Ansariel). These marks are per-session only unlike Contact Sets which are stored on disk in the computer being used. If an avatar has had a mark applied that colour will take precedence over Contact Set colouring. A mark can be applied via the right click menu on an avatar in the minimap or the Nearby list.

  • The ability to show the avatar’s distance as part of their nametag and optionally to colour just the distance or more of the nametag (except the complexity value which has its own colouring) based on that distance. This will be overridden by Contact Set or minimap mark colouring if set and enabled.

  • Colouring of name tags, chat text (including toasts), minimap avatar symbols and the Nearby list based on friend status, minimap marks and Contact Set settings.

  • The colouring of the distance shown in the People:Nearby floater is now customisable and may be turned off.

  • People:Nearby can show colours for friends as well as marked or Contact Set added avatars. The colouring of friends can be enabled in Preferences/Colors of the Minimap/Nearby tab and uses the same colour as friends on the minimap (“Also in Nearby list” shown below)

  • Contact Sets are now included in the previously ported backup/restore feature. Note that if you have an existing backup you should take a new backup to have the Contact Set configuration included.

  • The ability to reset all customisable settings has been ported (it appears on Preferences/Setup) along with a new feature to only reset customised colours (which appears on Preferences/Colors on the Misc tab). Warning: “all customisable settings” means exactly that - unless you have a previously backed up group of settings to restore you will have to reapply all customisations manually. The colour reset feature only resets colour customisations.

The Contact Sets panel is part of the People floater. It can be invoked directly from the main menu or by adding an icon to the toolbar.

Colours are set mostly on the Color tab of Preferences however the colouring is also influenced by the option to show friends coloured in their name tags (in Preferences/General) and by configuration settings per Contact Set where colours can be chosen and colouring enabled. The images below show all the main places where colours can be configured.

If Contact Set colouring is not behaving as expected check the configuration for that particular set (via the People/Contact Sets tab) and make sure the options to apply colours have been turned on for that set.

It is possible to add an avatar to more than one Contact Set, however if both sets have colouring enabled only one of the colours will be used. This can give rise to unexpected colours that prove difficult to track down. One way to solve this fairly easily is to select each Contact Set in turn within the People/Contact Sets tab and look for an entry which is incorrectly coloured. Once it has been seen, look through the other Contact Sets to find the one which contains the same avatar and is applying the colour seen previously. Since each Contact Set can independently have each of the four types of colouring (name tag, chat, minimap and nearby list) turned on or off there is the potential for some very versatile configurations to be set up that could also prove difficult to troubleshoot.

Colour or Color?

Both spellings are used above. Being British, my normal spelling is ‘colour’ however the viewer uses the American spelling ('color') throughout, thus in the documentation above “color” is used where it refers to a part of the viewer user interface (such as the Colors tab in Preferences) and “colour” is used elsewhere.