Clothing Acronyms in Event View.

[Cogliostro]

Here's sort of what it could look like:

2843-6.20: Winonna [de-CR.LP.ls] says: "Thanks Cogliostro, I love my new clothes!"

- Every wearable, visible item gets its own small two-letter abbreviation, for example we might have CR for the ladies corset and ls for the leather shoes. Larger noticeable items have theirs in caps, smaller items like jewelery use small cursive letters. Winnona is wearing a pair of diamond earrrings (de), a corset (CR), pair of leather pants (LP), and elegant little leather shoes (ls).

- The two-letter abbreviations are colour coded. Leather is browish, hemp greyish-greenish, wool a nice woozy grey, etc. Everything uses understated and mute colours, with the exception of gold or diamond jewelery, which respectively would be bright yellow and white, but still only small in lettering.

- The complete string representing what is being worn is displayed next to each character's name when they speak, as shown. Mousing over an individual two-letter abbreviation pops up the full text description of that clothing item in a convenient floating box (bit like we have now when you mouse over char names)

- The entire thing is realized in a nice, squarish and small font, so that it doesn't cause garishness or dizziness when looking at the events screen when many fashionistic people are talking.

- Each two-letter abbreviation is a link you can click on, if you do it just takes you to the usual char description screen.

[Ice-Man]

What is this pupposed to do except increased load on server?

[SekoETC]

You could see and remember what someone looks like without having to go to their description page. But if we got the graphical avatars to the javascript popup, that would do the same thing in more detail. Although it might be heavy to load.

The clothes pretty much matter only when you see them the first time, so I wonder if it would be possible to mention them only when the observer sees the person for the first time of if the target has changed clothes since the last time you saw them. Like "You see a man in his twenties arriving from the road to X. He wears a hemp hat, hemp tunic, hemp trousers and leather shoes."

The original suggestion sounds like something that could be modified with Greasemonkey so people could set their own colors and abbreviations.

[Doug R.]

Dear Lord, no. No. The very last thing I need is system mandated abbreviations in the event view that I will be forced to memorize or ignore.

[Piscator]

I agree there. It looks pretty ugly. It would be better to mention the full names in the mouseover menu or something like that.

[tiddy ogg]

No! No! More clutter. If you're crazy enough to want this stuff, then do it yourself in your descriptions of chars.

[Cogliostro]

I've already entered numerous suggestions in the past addressing this same problem - how clothes and jewelry have "no effect" on anything in the game until you deliberately go and look in the description page. Previously I came up with the idea of the event view telling us who's "well dressed" in expensive attire, and who is a "rude boy". But that got shot down by people that felt we couldn't for some reason decide what is expensive and what isn't in the realm of clothes/decorum, people that I've decided for myself to just call the "roleplay anal-ysts", in honour of their unbelievable attention for these back end details.

Here, the idea has been that now each individually dressed person would leave a kind of subdued "colour afterimage" in our minds as we scan the events screen and read messages. Even if you completely ignore the acronyms and don't care about their meaning or what anyone is wearing, you would still, no way around it, be forced to take note of the super-fancy dressed characters, or ones that have attire you never usually see in your area/town. That's the key purpose and meaning of the suggestion that I felt might justify the little extra CPU/database expense.

Come on, Cantrian ladies, it's your time. Now or never, speak up or the male chauvinist rudimentarists will bury this shockingly cool idea too!

[marol]

Character description including clothes will be available on hover popup on events page in future.