Simple Ideas

Enyalida

I get what you mean, but it's pretty easily fixed by having shorter pages, with more pageturns and fewer likely MOREs.

Portius

If you make your pages short enough to treat them like pages, you rapidly hit a prohibitively high pagecount on long books. It was a problem I ran into trying to do the formatting on a few of my longer books. It does work for short-medium books, though. Assuming that you don't need longer pages for some other formatting reason, which is pretty rare.

Elanorwen

Portius said:

Doing them manually is easier said than done in a lot of cases. A book's page (what you get when you go READ BOOK PAGE X) is really more like a chapter in a real book, in terms of how people use it.) The analogue to a real book's page is one scrolling, with MORE turning the page. So you'd want to put them at the bottom of each those sections, and doing that accurately by hand is a difficult and time consuming. Plus, since pagelength is configurable you'll never get it right for anyone who changes theirs off the default.

If you put your footnotes at the bottom of the page instead of the MORE section, then you either have to scroll down to the end and then scroll back up or wait until the end of the page to get all the footnotes at once. Both of these are very suboptimal. Selenity's way of doing it has the same problem, since it involves opening up new sections.

What I want is to be be able to designate a footnote at a given position and its associated text, and have the footnote get displayed at the bottom of the section that displays the footnote's position, rather than at the bottom of the page or as its own thing that can be looked up. I'd also like to mark them with a superscripted number, which is currently impossible to the best of my knowledge.


EDIT: Because I realize what I want might not be clear without an example, here's what I'm after. Pretend the bracketed number is a superscript:

Portius[1], in his seminal work on the importance of footnotes.....

[1]A Hallifaxian scholar and poet of some repute.
-----MORE------

With the footnote being automatically inserted right above the prompt to do MORE.

It sounds nice on paper, certainly, but like you said, pagelength can be configured. As such, you will either need some way to link footnote to text on the page or you can end up in a situation where your footnotes are not matching what's in the current virtual page.

For instance, if my pagelength is twice yours, and you put two footnotes in two pages, they would both be:

Elanorwen[1]
Portius[1]

[1] A crazy aeromage.
[2] A Hallifaxian scholar... etc
------MORE------

Or are we going to be showing all the footnotes for that book page in every virtual page? If you have more than 2 footnotes per book page, that will become much more unwieldy as the 'more' prompt happens at the end of the virtual page, but you're adding more lines before that end, so you will be displaying less 'book' per virtual page.

In other words... it won't be as feasible if there isn't some form of linking, but linking would require modifying the editor itself to allow for variables and to expand on them when it displays a virtual page which doesn't sound like a simple task to add. Nice on paper... but I doubt it will be anywhere close to a high priority endeavour.

Everiine

You know the name of this thread is Simple ideas, right? :P

Portius

Believe me, adding in footnotes sounded simpler in my head!

I have no idea what the linking would entail, not being anything resembling a programmer, but that I believe that is what I had in mind, yes. Basically detecting what was being shown on that MORE and providing the footnotes at the end as appropriate.

Niun

Not sure if simple or not, but this is certainly very frustrating:

With a flourish of his arm, Edor bows deeply.
5053h, 7844m, 7131e, 10p, 18715en, 30595w mBexkdb-
Edor leaves to the north.
5053h, 7844m, 7131e, 10p, 18715en, 30595w mBexkdb-
Vumiri Shee-Slaugh, King of the Night Coven says, "To edor B'hal, Ward."
5053h, 7844m, 7131e, 10p, 18715en, 30595w mBexkdb-
You say, "To edor Tidings, young Ward."
5053h, 7844m, 7131e, 10p, 18715en, 30595w mBexkdb-
Vumiri Shee-Slaugh, King of the Night Coven says, "Or not."
5053h, 7844m, 7131e, 10p, 18715en, 30595w mBexkdb-


... why can't it just say

That person isn't here.

... instead of allowing it to go through if the target is a player.

Daraius

Because sometimes you might want to say something like "To Edor or not to Edor, that is the question." 

Someone suggested SAYTO a while back, which I think would nicely solve the problem of mistargeted says.

Lendren

SAYTO is nice for avoiding that situation, but it also avoids the opposite situation: you can't say "To go there..." if there's someone named Gorothul near you. You just can't. 

Ssaliss

Actually, I believe that saying by using ' instead of SAY bypasses the player targetting. At least it used to.

Arcanis

It recently came to my attention that, though there is a skill to create pathways, there seems to be none to remove one. Was this intentional? It seems like something that was forgotten. Rifts, that are the most similar to pathways, have both create, remove, transverse as well as other abilities like making them inaccessible for a time. This seems like a bit of a predicament if certain pathways were made that seem like a threat (such as to important enemy mobs) as well as the general over abundance that would come with a create, but no delete.


Solutions:

1 - Place an ability in Ecology and Tracking that would allow for the collapsing of a Pathway.

Or

2 - Place an ability in Environment for the collapsing of a Pathway. Additionally make an ability that would allow one to sense if a pathway is in the room (for those without the artifact or skill).

Or

3 - Solution 1 and 2

Or

4 - Allow the artifact that gives access to pathways to also be able to remove them.

Lerad

There most certainly is a way to remove pathways. People going around removing pathways are irritating the same way removing rifts are.

Synkarin

Yeah, can definitely remove pathways

Arcanis

Synkarin said:

Yeah, can definitely remove pathways

oh? I looked through Hunting, Tracking and Ecology. Seems no ability.

Rivius

I was wondering, can we make the protean spiders act like loyal mobs? Like maybe be able to drop one and make it follow you? Maybe add some occasional ambiences when it's on the ground? From the description, it's technically a living creature, so why not?

Enyalida

Arcanis said:

Synkarin said:

Yeah, can definitely remove pathways

oh? I looked through Hunting, Tracking and Ecology. Seems no ability.

It's waaaay simpler than you think.

Kaimanahi

I am essentially trying to use gmcp to check if my beast/ent is in the room with me. However, when I move, p, li { white-space: pre-wrap; }gmcp.Char.Items.List does not get populated with any ents in my entourage (a second forced QL will update the table properly). Strangely the table does get populated with any ents that are following my player entourage (e.g., Saoirse is following me and a phoenix mob is following Saoirse; if I move a room, the phoenix gets populated into the gmcp list). Any chance that this could get added?

Ssaliss

Hmm. Odd, it gets added when I move. I get the following when I move:

Plain-text room name and items
Char.Items.List
Room.Players
You see exits leading north, northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest.
Char.Items.Add (mount)
Room.Info
Room.Players
Char.Vitals

Not sure if there's a difference if the beast is camouflaged or not.

Kaimanahi

It's not camouflaged. I think it does get added to gmcp.Char.Items.Add (assuming no other mobs are following you, or in your entourage's entourage, in which case it could be one of those other mobs/items). But I'm really talking about when I check the gmcp.Char.Items.List table after moving, it is not there until I force a new QL.

Ssaliss

Ah, gotcha. Frankly, I'd think that's a client thing, since the data is being sent to it and everything, but I wouldn't really mind beasts being included in the first Char.Items.List a whole lot. Of course, this probably means new stuff that wanders into the room isn't in Char.Items.List table either before you do a new QL, and no amount of server-side recoding would fix that.

Enyalida

That's why when you move, you don't constantly see your beast in the room already when you get there, but you see your player entourage's entourage.

Rialorm

Could CONFIG NEWSIGNORE be expanded to allow for ignoring any news board you have no interest in instead of just the three that are possible right now? What I am trying to achieve on an alt is to ignore all boards except boards said alt only has access to such as guild, org, order ect. I'm not really interested in seeing politics on the alt for example, because I'll have read it on Ria through the browser addon already, same for stuff like announce or overhaul news. I'd like to log in on the alt, and have RN bring up only new things, to allow for quickly catching up instead of going through a backlog of politics and other spam.

Arcanis

could we get these Help files:

HELP PRESTIGE to explain the importance of prestige, it's effects, as well as list all the stages (homeless wretch made me lol). It is slightly mentioned in HELP STATUS but isnt very explanatory.

in HELP TOLERANCE, could we get all the levels listed for future reference to those seeing how far they can reach?

Siam

HEXLIST

Separate command for a hexen that shows all hexes(those in the room, those attached to their hex aura, and those drawn on other body parts)

Drakius

Sayto would be awesome. That way if I whisper to someone I don't end up talking to tomo, or if I whisper "I think we should go kill hallifax." I don't end up whispering nothing to Iari.

Xeltha

I second sayto. It's what I'm used to, and it's very useful for 'sayto' to throw an error instead of 'say to' writing out the equivalent of say "to (name)" and make everything awkward.

Riluna

Arcanis said:

could we get these Help files:

HELP PRESTIGE to explain the importance of prestige, it's effects, as well as list all the stages (homeless wretch made me lol). It is slightly mentioned in HELP STATUS but isnt very explanatory.

in HELP TOLERANCE, could we get all the levels listed for future reference to those seeing how far they can reach?

I've got the prestige levels for you, if it helps.

On the "positive" side:

nondescript -> common -> well-to-do -> prosperous -> opulent -> like royalty

And for "negative" prestige:

nondescript -> tawdry -> shabby -> pathetic -> beggarly -> like a homeless wretch.

EDIT: Also, though I have no way to actually confirm this 100%, I believe if you get to "like royalty" there's still a lot of room for more prestige. As in, you can be a lot more "like royalty" than somebody who has just barely reached the threshold to even see it

Qistrel

How do you even get below tawdry?

Riluna

Qistrel said:

How do you even get below tawdry?

The scarecrow hat starts you at "shabby", and ignores all your positive prestige you're wearing.

Outside of dingbat artifacts, it's tawdry clothing. Eventually, mending clothes turns them tawdry, and you can't even tell what they were beforehand. You can continue to mend, and they get even worse. Tawdry, shabby, and pathetic level clothing. Wearing that stuff gives you "negative" prestige.

Qistrel

Really? My scarecrow hat puts me at tawdry, not shabby. Hmmm.

Riluna

Yep, you're right. Either it got changed, or I'm just remembering wrong, but its true power is ignoring anything you're wearing that's not tawdry. Stack that stuff with your hat, and you'll see those levels easily.

It's just super hard to find tawdry clothes. Nobody seems to sell it anymore, in the North, anyway.

For a simple idea, I would love a Tailoring skill that lets you insta-tawdryfy clothes, rather than waiting through weeks/months for it to degrade.