A Land Far Away

Here's an idea I wanted to share with the wider community. I already floated it to the TSM team, and they looked kindly upon it.

Perhaps someone has some further, or operative, ideas for implementation.

The base idea is that due to different time zones and frequency of board activity, not everyone knows the same at any given time. So, why not have a small log-in message pop-up that sets the general mood? This would help a shared playing experience, and put people on a somewhat comparable level of information.

I'm thinking about short, brief standard texts, that can be easily varied with each module update as seen fit. Depending on the frequency and wish of updates, they could contain seasonal information ("It is fall."), information about the weather ("It is fall. The weather is still mild."), or even pointers to general-affecting events ("It is fall. The weather is still mild. The Lion's Way is unusually lively with travellers.").

The main idea is to improve our integrated communication, and open up an in-game channel to have people have more of a shared mood and experience upon playing.

It's not a biggie, but certainly won't be hurtful. The only drawback is the slight additional work it requires in mod-maintenance and updating, but hopefully that could be kept to a minimum with a clever implementation.

Cheers,

The is a very small custom calendar GUI that is very good. It it's collapsed form, it's the size of any icon on the toolbar (very small) and it just shows a clock. You can drag it anywhere on the screen.

Screenshot on vault

In it's expanded form, it shows the date, time of day or moon phase, and there is a 2da file that you can edit to put custom strings on the 2nd line. You could use this to display the various major and religious holidays. Neat, huh?

If someone made a few little thermometer icons the size of regular icons, it could be adapted pretty easily to show ambient temperature, also. I have no grafikal skills, so that part would be up to someone else. (I would suggest maybe having it turn blue when it got below freezing.) I'm sure a google search would knock out the holidays quickly.

This approach isn't intrusive and it's persistent, unlike log-in messages.

Loving this idea, would really help folk act IC to these dates, and could even help us get a good bearing on timescale (something that'd also be nice)

Well, find someone with the faintest 2d graphic skills to make a few icons. If it's left up to me, it'll probably end up looking more like an arousal widget for Haven than a thermometer.

As fun as the whole, George Costanza, "I was in the pool!" would be for the first winter...

Using NWNX4 MySQL plugin, our central database, and the website we could have something that could be edited through a drupal module.

A DM can click on the website, type in the current message. It is stored in the database.
Each time a player logs in, a NWscript gets the message from the database and prints it.

I can program all this easily.

I need to finish the new vault system first but could do that quickly when we are beta testing the vault.

Much like the general idea. There's two drawbacks I see:

1) Messages need to be updated enough to make the massages sensible instead of seem like a chunk of dead meat.

2) It will make people even more lazy in reading the presumably better posts and IC information on the forums.

Instead of a persistent messageboard someone needs to keep up to date, perhaps something like this:

Give DMs the ability to write notes that pop-up for players on every login. Each note is an IC notification about something recent in the setting many characters would be aware of, leaving finaly judgement of PC level of awaresness to the player. Crucially each note is always written with a duration in RL days how long it is current, and thus how long it keeps popping up. So that clean-up is done while posting.

This would give the DMs a IC channel to post very important setting information every PC should know ("Town nearby pillaged by X!"), and also let in smaller snippets to, for example, signify PC achievements.

Neat "mood" idea, if it turns out to be a PITA to cook it into modules though, sticking it on the forums (such as near the server numbers display) with the ability to either feed it from a table or as updated from time to time by HDMs as like, an override, might work too.