Inf-o-matic

The bottomright corner in Habbo is and always has been where information is displayed, after clicking on a) a piece of furniture, b) a person or c) the person that is you. When that person is another Habbo, or you, or that piece of furniture is yours, additional controls are available, or controls are shown to act towards another person. It was only at version 17 (October 2007) Habbo started calling this the ‘Inf-o-matic’ and started developing it as an entity in itself instead of some loose controls (display of what was clicked was not tight to the displayed controls).

In very early Kultakala and Habbo UK it looked like this →. There was a ‘plate’ floating in space, on the right side of the room, always there (just empty when not having clicked anything yet). Clicking anyone would get you a fullsize view on the person, her/his name in the box, and ‘motto’ displayed below it.

← Same for pieces of furniture, having their own motto/description, and quite soon the edges of the name box got rounded, and before that, the box became ‘shine-through’, showing bottom of plate.

One additional thing shown, the badge someone was wearing. You have to understand, up till 2006, regular users hardly had badges, one exception, the HC badge. But no-one besides staff had multiple badges. There actually was a dialog for a long while, doubleclicking the badge, you could set it to hidden or visible with. Only when having multiple badges it also allowed you to pick another: . Like said, just staff used it like that, regular users were not aware of this dialog having possible arrows for long after, it was quite a buzz when people saw it in staff screenshots. In a nutshell: .

Now the controls we talked about were - mostly (at some point they were shown below) - not attached to this display, but positioned in bottom-right corner of the screen. They showed a similar simple evolution of display. They’re still almost equal to controls available today:

• For yourself: Wave & Dance (when being in HC, this turned into a dropdown menu). At the end of 2006, when ‘Habbo Homes’ were introduced, a (go to) ‘Homepage’ button was added. Around same time a ‘Badge’ button was added, users having more badges and this button leading to dialog to choose the one to wear;
• For another person: ‘Ask to be a friend’ & Trade. v7 added an ‘Ignore’ button. The ‘Homepage’ was added here too in 2006, late 2008 the ‘Respect’ button was added and late 2009 the option to ‘Report’ someone was added to controls too;
• For furniture you own: Move, Rotate and Pick up. Also in an any room you have rights in, besides ability to pick up. Early Kultakala also had a ‘Delete’ button but that was soon removed.

Homepage in the end was moved to title bar of box displaying yourself, waving, dancing all moved to a ‘Me’-menu, which you get when clicking yourself and/or your head in toolbar. No controls in main window anymore here. Furniture, still same basic controls that were there from start. Clicking any other person still gets you a full set of controls as pictured below (bottom), though. That ‘Hug’ button by the way, is real, it just never got used. Makes you wonder…

But now we’re talking about recently added and moved controls, but still missing a piece of what happened to ‘Inf-o-matic’ since being introduced in 2007. Basically, it went from being very complex, with loads of additions, back to some more simple way of showing basic things (lots of additions removed, or rather, moved elsewhere again).

Ok, so even before v17 some additions were made. Habbo groups were introduced, so badge display was moved up and favorite group badge displayed below. But it was with v17 and versions after (new versions started coming faster by then) they started adding lots of functionality and things to display (←) there. First versions met a lot of complaints. Habbo hadn’t even gone widescreen by them, people said it was too big and in their way. So in response it was made less wide (scrollable titlebar for long names) and transparent.

The controls were semi-attached to the dialog, though they still looked different, but you could show/hide them, like tags. Stuff was moved around and changed numerous times: . In the end, conclusion can only be this is rather complicated and not intuitive for new users at all.

Beta/v34, re-coding the hotel anyway, things got a more logical place. For the Inf-o-matic, this was moving all the new additions out again. Clicking someone/something gets you basic display and controls alone. When clicking someone else you get to see what that person wants you to see (and the homepage button still there is only an unintrusive icon) - . For functionality, a new so-called ‘Me’-menu was created, gathering all these options in one place: . Clicking yourself or your head in toolbar gets you this new menu (bottom-left corner), it’s pretty telling its own story in a glance. Ofcourse, there’s another set of options available when checking inventory; there simply are loads of advanced options available these days. Which is cool, but new users now get a chance to get playing fast and easy, while they can gradually get to the more advanced things later on.

One instance where inf-o-matic still has a lot of advanced functionality is when clicking your own pet: . Feeding, training your critter has become a rather specialized job :p.