Page 1 of 2

Location Name Wipe Questions

Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2005 7:15 pm
by Savanik
Several thoughts occur to me with the upcoming name wipe.

1. If we have a problem in a certain area, how will we tell support staff where it happened?

2. Can we use special characters in the new names, and if so, what kind? For example, I have a character in the Russian area, and would using Cyrillic characters mess things up? I'm sure someone will try using HTML tags like COLOR in theirs at some point.

Sav

Re: Location Name Wipe Questions

Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2005 7:49 pm
by Chris Johnson
Savanik wrote:Several thoughts occur to me with the upcoming name wipe.

1. If we have a problem in a certain area, how will we tell support staff where it happened?


Generally we can trace it by knowing your character's proper name and/or your player id and what you called the location (if the character is not there any longer) . Its going to be harder ... but we'll cope :)

Savanik wrote:2. Can we use special characters in the new names, and if so, what kind? For example, I have a character in the Russian area, and would using Cyrillic characters mess things up? I'm sure someone will try using HTML tags like COLOR in theirs at some point.


To be honest there may be issues with both extended characters and html . the whole issue is one high on the internal development list . ... again ... Its going to be harder ... but we'll cope :lol:

In general they shouldn't be problems with naming of locations (they do sometimes cause problems with naming of building projects ) and we are looking at handling them in a more robust way than currently.

EDIT: If you can use special texts in naming a person they'll work exactly the same in naming a location

Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2005 9:25 pm
by Jos Elkink
I don't think using Cyrillic will cause any problems. I had no problems using Cyrillic when playing my Russian char, nor for other chars' names, nor for buildings or locations (she immediately renamed all non-Cyrillic names to Cyrillic :) ...)

Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2005 2:29 am
by Racetyme
Will road names be wiped in addition to location names?

Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2005 10:48 am
by Jos Elkink
Racetyme wrote:Will road names be wiped in addition to location names?


I didn't think of that. Already fewer roads than locations have names in the first place. I would have no objection to wiping them immediately as well, but well ... people will probably object again ;) ...

Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2005 11:44 am
by SekoETC
Especially when you can't rename roads.

Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2005 2:05 pm
by Agar
Ohhhh. Let us rename roads! That would be almost as much fun as locations! Start having memorial roads, Naming them after the people improving them, charge tolls, all sorts of fun stuff!

Let us rename roads!

Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2005 5:32 pm
by Oasis
Then all maps would become useless. I smell mass chaos brewing. :?

Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2005 8:20 pm
by Savanik
Oasis wrote:Then all maps would become useless. I smell mass chaos brewing. :?


All maps made by lazy, lazy people who didn't bother to write down which direction the dang road goes in would become useless. :)

Sav

Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2005 9:57 pm
by AngelSpice
Savanik wrote:All maps made by lazy, lazy people who didn't bother to write down which direction the dang road goes in would become useless. :)



The roads didn't always say which direction they ran in.

Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2005 11:26 pm
by Sho
My mapmaker characters would note road directions by looking at their own character descriptions while walking. Simple enough.

Posted: Thu Oct 20, 2005 3:20 am
by Nick
This will also encourage more graphical maps.

Posted: Thu Oct 20, 2005 10:42 am
by julie2
I’m stunned that this is going to implemented, after all the discussion in this thread:

http://www.cantr.net/forum/viewtopic.ph ... ing#111827

That left me with the the impression that the ProgD (well, Chris at least ) was in favour of my alternative suggestion for re-naming towns. See Chris’s post here:

http://www.cantr.net/forum/viewtopic.ph ... ing#112330.

I STILL thinkthat we badly neeed a way of signposts in towns and roads in such a way that everybody can se the signpost, just like IRL. We don’t have to ask around to know where we are and where the roads lead, because if the place is even half-way civilised, then somebody will have put up a signs.

Previously that was done automatically by the software. Now it won’t be done automatically, we badly need a way of doing it ourselves. And, no, landmarks won’t do the trick, because
A) You can’t set them to point at roads
B) ANYONE CAN BUILD ONE AND NOBODY CAN DEFACE OR ALTER ONE. The result?You can have several conflicting town names on display, along with gravestones, etcetera, all hidden somewhere near the bottom of the objects list. What’s the use in that?

I’m all for blanking out the town names IF AND ONLY IF we have a decent syetem for re-naming them by consensus. Dynamic naming isn’t the answer. It works for people, because you learn people’s names when they walk up and introduce themselves. You don’t learn the name of a town because it walked up and introduced itself. You learn it by looking at the signs (unless it’s undiscovererd. Then you just have to make your own sign , if you need one)

C’mon. Cantrians aree already overburdenened with the need to communicate before they proceed. In many places , you might wait days for somebody to give you directions to the next town. and the more necessary that becomes, the less fun it’ll be for all the playesrs concerned, who might only have time to make two or three speeches in a day, renmember? They might want to occasionally say something a little less banal than “ There’s the road to Quillanoi “ and “Please desist from gathering (followed by a time-consuming effort at dragging the offender off)

Posted: Thu Oct 20, 2005 11:15 am
by Chris Johnson
I only wish everything I liked or was in favour of , was accepted :)

But you will be pleased to hear that the suggestion for Signposts has been accepted and moved to accepted suggestions.

Posted: Sat Oct 22, 2005 1:01 pm
by julie2
Thanks Chris

There are two major problems with this:

A) Some of the directions given for roads are just plain WRONG when compared to the little map in the location page and other larger maps generated from this. Don't ask me which, I didn't note them down, as it didn't seem to matter too much before we were forced to rely on those directions, and I haven't been everywhere, after all. I must have only noticed a small percentage of such mistakes I CAN say, however that there are two roads heading out of Lad Forest North in a South Easterly direction, which might be right in both cases for all I know, but c'mon. that's making things far too difficult isn't it?

B)If you're in a vehicle you can't see which direction you're travelling in, and neither can others see which direction you're travellin in. Also, I'm not sure you can see people outside pointing from a vehicle, so if you stop and ask for directions , you'll be none the wiser (Leave the vehicle? What if it lacks a lock? And what if you're trasporting a captive?). In fact there are loads of things you can't see from a vehicle, and now suddenly it all matters even more than it used to.