by Carl Palmner » Mon Jan 03, 2011 11:54 am
GPN--love the screenshots, looks very very nice.
Just wanted to throw in my support as well. I think a Writer's Nexus is an excellent idea. I also like the idea of categories, since, with over 70 fan Ages now available, simply lumping them all into one list we scroll through is a bit tedious. I've seen a few different category suggestions. Personally I prefer a "tag" system wherein each Age could be tagged with various descriptors and the list could be filtered to show only Ages with specific tags. For example, someone using the Writer's Nexus interface might select "Puzzle" and "Story" as tags, and the list would then display only Ages that have been tagged as containing puzzles to solve and significant story. This is the system used by Little Big Planet and many other games that support user-uploaded content and I think it works well, especially for smaller communities like ours. Another advantage to a "tag" system over a standard category system is that each Age could have multiple tags--perhaps up to 10 or 15, even, depending on how many tags are used and how specific they are.
There have been a lot of category suggestions. Here's my own list, either for a category system or a tag system:
-Puzzle
-Story
-Large/Medium/Small (these should obviously be mutually exclusive)
-Garden
-Indoor/Outdoor/In-and-outdoor (once again, mutually exclusive)
-D'ni (for locations that are supposed to be part of D'ni, not separate Ages)
-Player Nexi (I'm referring here to Ages like Andy's Nexus or that one Age that Whilyam has--I forget the name--which Links to all his other Ages. These are Ages that serve primarily as "hubs" for multiple other Ages)
-Minigames (Ages where one can play games with others, like the Chess and Checkers Ages. If Jalak was a fan Age it would go here too, as would Ahyoheek if it had its own Age)
There could of course be many more.
Two other features I think are a great idea: First, Kaelisebonrai suggested in another thread (maybe in this one too, I don't know) that we have a set of "featured" Ages which would change regularly, and consist of Ages that we as a Guild think are particularly worth visiting and want to promote. I think this is a great way to promote quality, so long as an Age has to pass some kind of majority vote before getting featured, and so long as the number of featured Ages is always limited. Second, in addition to being able to filter Ages by category, I would love to see us able to access convenient and easy-to-use lists of Age by AUTHOR. I realize this is available offline and even online in basic text format, but I'm talking about something that could be implement in the Writer's Nexus itself--i.e. perhaps the ability to filter the list by author rather than tag.
Of course I realize I am talking about a lot of coding, none of which I am able to do because I don't know python or anything about programming with Uru. These are really just suggestions right now. I imagine python probably has some provision for some kind of database sorting, though--before I forgot all my Java and C++ I could easily have written a program to sort information this way, but like I said, I know nothing about python so maybe my suggestions are unrealistic.
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