Guild of Writers

Is it possible to create your own working Relto pages. By working I mean, stick it in the book, toggle it from the book and have it show/not show in the age itself.

Possible: yes. Easy to integrate: nope. And you're going to need Tweek's "Powered by Yeesha magic" sticker.

would that need to be next to the Guild of Maintainers' Seal?

I've not been here long, but from what I've gathered if D'Lanor or the other Python programmers say that something is hard, it is probably near impossible for us mere modellers/texturers!

It would be really neat to add more Relto pages, though. Have an unmarked one that creates a music player that Rickrolls you, or something.

PeteC wrote:Is it possible to create your own working Relto pages. By working I mean, stick it in the book, toggle it from the book and have it show/not show in the age itself.

I would love to, and I would hate to have such functionality.

I would love to, because it would allow us as Age creators to reward players for making progress the same way the Cyan does.

On the other hand: Relto is pretty small age. First we would have to come with idea of some workflow system so all things added to Relto won't collide with each over (like, for example: 10 types of roof You could choose). And then if every Age creator (and Cyan of course ) will try to add something new to Relto, we would still get "clusterf$%k" . Picture this: imagine that every Shell in AhraPahts would have a puzzle and for solving that puzzle You would get some thing to add To you Relto.


So right now I would think rather about making a "trophy age" (working title). Developed the same way as Rell-to age (two weeks for a person, and then someone else taking it). A something like a Garden of Wonder, to which everyone will be able to add something. And that "something" would be like relto page: owner of garden instance would have some way to turn it on/off, and accessible by player by checking players chronicle for succeeding in task in other ages.
A new Jorney beings. With a new symbol (on a clouth? on a rock? or something completely different?)

Another big issue is conflicts: Currently, fan-ages are rather self-contained. Sure, they need a place in the global ID-space, but we have a sequence prefix management, they need Python- and sound files which share a namespace of all ages, but most age writers correctly use 4-letter-prefixes. But that's about it. When it gets to adding global animations, clothing, GUI elements, Relto pages or whatever, we need new coordination systems for *each of them* to make sure that two random ages someone has installed do not conflict. We have nothing like that.
In the Offline KI, I am in the lucky position to be able to say "this is not compatible with any other hack, except for fan-ages", so I can pollute these global namespaces (in tight coordination with Drizzle, which I want to be compatible with and which also does a lot in the global namespace). But no fan age can do that.
For example, speaking of Relto pages: We can't just put a file somewhere and be done. You need a prp file for Relto, but someone or something global has to load it when linking there. There are some places currently that have a list of all Yeesha pages, they need to be changed for each new one - one of the rather critical ones is Relto SDL, we absolutely do NOT want any age to edit any other age's SDL. Each new Relto page needs to be added to the global GUI component, too (I'm not even sure whether that can be done by just loading a page).
So, basically, we have everything we need for someone to add a Relto page to his local installation. But if two people do that, merging the two is about as much work as creating them. So you can either say that your fan-age is incompatible with the Offline KI and any other fan age that adds a Relto page - or Relto pages would need to be distributed and installed independently of the ages, being always present, but disabled until the player can actually get to the age and collect it. And the latter would still need quite some organizing. Not to mention that we usually keep manual modifications of Cyan ages to a minimum - every modification in Relto is automatically done by Drizzle (the Offline KI just brings the necessary Python and SDL code to get them working), most of it being just copied from the MOUL file when you convert them, plus some texture changes (to get the custom book covers). Nothing visible is modelled manually there (the only ages where we have that are city and hood).