Guild of Writers

= How to build a Home Age =

Shorah One and All

With Sandbox proven and dusted the next phase was going to be a wiki on how to use the patched content of MOUL. But due to the current restrictions on MOUL content I am dropping this subject indefinitely. Instead I am moving onto Phase 2... How to Build a Home Age.

Once this is done, the info will be added to GoW's wiki to help age builders do what they do best, but giving you a clean slate to work from. Compatibility is a key issue here, and at no time will I be showing you how to modify GoW's CWE/dirtsand code base. The reason is that I have already thought out a way to implement shard hopping, which is impossible if compability is broken.

This wiki can't be done alone, and needs solid technical advise, and not ideas! If you have ideas, please post them somewhere else where they are needed and will be valued. However this is not the thread for that.

The know-how that will be detailed in the new wiki will cover;

1) The structure of a python file and what needs to be changed for your Home Age
2) The structure of an SDL file and what needs to be changed for your Home Age
3) The structure of an age file and what needs to be changed for your Home Age
4) How to change the default startup age to your home age
5) How to link out from your home age to another age

Prerequisites:
1) The methodology will be based on the wiki... Sandbox Shard
2) You will need at least two ages that you have built, to follow this wiki. One for your startup age, the other age for testing the ability to link.
3) Most of the Cyan content is going to be stripped out. (...gulp! for some of you - dont worry, if you want Cyan content, you must have a default install somewhere)
4) The size of the finished Home Age installation is going to reduce to by around 1 gig to 2 gigs, which makes data serving and age loading faster, and may just speed up things quite a bit.

If you are interested in this thread (and wiki) and want to add some value, feel free to join the team.

http://www.guildofwriters.com/wiki/Deve ... _Age_Howto

Later

Phoenix

Shorah

The link above has been deleted;

I have had no explanation why it was removed. According to the site GoW is here to help writers and builders with the tools they need to write and build ages, so I am not pleased that I was not notified.

The Home Age is one tool that will come to be the corner stone of CWE evolution. Only those with foresight are able to see this.

Phoenix Rising
Writer Director

The deletion log and recent changes pages might be of interest.

Tsar

That is vague. Do you have some reservation to folk building 100% original content shards? I dont see how there can be lots of Cyan "content clones" out there and that it will keep the fan base alive. It makes shards pointless, because once you have visited one, you dont want to visit another, even if it had a few original ages snuck away in a different shard.

The CWE future has to go "Home Age" and "Shard Hopping", and I will say why...

If a builder can implement a custom home age (personal age) thats launches to it from start up, his shard will draw people because of the new content, and not because of the D'ni story. If he marries his story to the original story, his pull factor goes up. This is exactly what I am aiming for with "The Path of the Lion" series. I have been thinking this through very clearly and have done my homework on what moves the people. If people see the same thing on every shard they walk away to Ryzom, Second life, etc, because it is more dynamic. And that is what CWE needs like a heart bypass.

It needs more life!

MOUL already has lost its pull factor because of numerous issues, and it is only by breaking the previous mould that will resurrect it.

Now if other shards have 100% original content it means a few things;

The core of the story stays on 1 or 2 official shards, like Cyan and GoW to keep the entry point the same.
Once you get to a certian point you get to access other shards that expand on the story.
We get better distributed computing as a result because not everyone is visiting the same shard at one time, which results in less burden on the shard. Imagine a few hundred folk trying to access all the custom ages from UAM on one shard as well as the original story!
The story of D'ni gets to evolve by clever extensions to the story being launched on different shards.
The pull factor increases because folk get to create a custom home age, maybe a lounge or a bedroom, a farm or a mountain retreat, or something that they can invite friends to beside Relto which is so outmoded and outdated because it always stays the same except for rocks, vegetation and islands.

The Home Age is the first step to seeing Shard Hopping become a reality. Without a fresh approach to appeal to folk out there, they wont be back to visit because they always see exactly the same thing.

Later

Then you should form a team and modify the ages that are in Uru or create new ones. This does not require a wiki page. Wikis require a bit of common sense and calmness for when other people judge and modify your content. We really shouldn't let our feathers get ruffled when massive edits and changes happen on the wiki, especially when it's the supposed "Editor in Chief" making them.

That sounds like a good project, but what do you want to write onto the wiki page? Nothing like that has been done yet. So you can't write a how-to. Searching people for that idea would be great, or trying it yourself and asking for help here on the forums. Then when you are done, you can write up a documentation, and post that onto the wiki when it's done.
Not to mention that you never said what exactly you mean by "Shard hopping". If you mean a Shard selector on startup, your pull requests are welcome at GitHub. But what does that need a wiki page for?

I think the point being made is that if you don't actually know how to do what you intend to write a tutorial about, then you probably shouldn't be creating the tutorial on how to do it, at least until you do know how to do it, otherwise, you're just creating an empty page and then asking people to answer your questions on it.