Posted by Kim on November 19, 2022, 2:10pm
This was an unusual office hour month, because I had different in-progress things that I surprised each session with. I was presentable enough on Friday that I actually started that office hour by doing a live stream to discuss and demo the map designer project!(first five minutes are discussion of the project and its goals, demo starts at about 5 minutes)
Although the Saturday chat didn't get a live demo of the map maker, I did show them something else that's in the works:
This is a new NPC that's being developed, who will work alongside Moa. She will be able to customize and engrave items for you. I'm still pondering her color scheme heavily, and I wondered if people had favorites. The voting in the chat was heavily for #5, #2 and #1, in that order.
Onward to the Q&As!
And artists will take a chip of the profits from the sales of their assets?
If anyone is getting a "chip" sized amount it should be the RPR on assets artists make. The idea is that artists will take the bulk of the profit.
How are you and the mod team doing, Kim?
Claine: We've been busy
Kim: I don't think I can speak for the whole mod team, but I dumped a very different other big project on the mods that they've been helping me work through the past few days
Hopefully we'll have an announcement about that in the coming weeks. What I can say is it should make deciding whether to display a gallery image that is mature tagged much less of a crap shoot.When you see the character summaries when browsing community characters, when you see their gender, would it be possible to optionally display pronouns as well? Or would just listing the gender itself make it a given? :o I ask since not all non-binary people go by the same pronouns, for example. But I do think it might just be simple enough to add to their profile. What do you think, Kim?
I think it's certainly possible to do something like that, though it'll require us to come up with a fairly huge list of pronouns for people to select from. Anything that appears outside of the profile, without warnings, either needs the mods to be taking a look at it, or to come from a pre-approved list so we know people aren't typing nasty things into the input.
Probably the safest method right now is still writing pronouns on the profile.will there be another Winter Masquerade this year? : o
YES, I am definitely planning on a winter masquerade this year.
Tentatively scheduled for December 17th right now.What is winter masquerade?
It's a live RP event where everyone who wants to play gets into a live chat together and plays through a winter masquerade!
All attendees make a new, anonymous character, and they all attend a masked ball together. At the end of the event, we all "take off our masks" by declaring which character we were playing. It's often many, many hours long so that people in different time zones can participate. For the world map builder, do you get to create a new avatar per character?
Yes, at least one avatar per character. I actually think each character may need the opportunity to have a couple of forms... Maybe your character has regular wear and formal wear, or maybe they are a werewolf and have a human form and a wolf form, for example. So that's in my head. But I'm not going to for sure promise more than one avatar form per character yet.
Will we be able to design our own avatar assets too?
Yes, absolutely! And share/sell them to others, too.
Would special events ever be conducted with the new map system? Like masquerades?
WOULDN'T THIS BE COOL? Yes, I ABSOLUTELY want to do that!
About how many accounts has the whole "If a user deletes all their characters and is inactive for six months we assume they wanted their account closed and do it" cleaned up for the RPR?
(I had to look this up after the chat) In the last 12 years, it's closed 7571 accounts so far. A lot of those registered and never created a single character or group to begin with, and a fair portion of those were likely bots of some kind.
Since there's the option to delete your account I'd hope no one deletes it for being inactive. I go months without activity and the last time was 1-2 years.
Accounts aren't closed for being inactive, per se. They're closed for being both empty and inactive. So, if you have character profiles on your account, it doesn't matter how long you go without logging in, the account stays. But sometimes people don't know how to delete their actual user account, so they just delete all their character profiles and then never log back in again. Or, they register an account, but then never make a single thing and never log in again. So after about 6 months, those accounts get closed because there was nothing in them.
That auto-cleanup manages to zap a lot of failed spammer accounts that created an account, couldn't figure their way the deterrents to post junk on the forums, and then just never did anything ever as a result. That's the bulk of what gets auto-closed.
Oh, would the avatars in the map system be locked to a certain height/a set number of pixels? Can they be less or at maximum for this height, to display different character statures? Or is it too early to say?
I have actually put a lot of thought into this, so I *think* I have an answer for you. There will be a minimum and maximum height, of course, but there isn't a requirement that they all be exactly the same single height, either. Most likely we will have about 4 starting bases, and then assets sized to those 4 starting bases. (Similar to what's already here: https://www.rprepository.com/avatarbuilder) Artists would then be able to make assets for any of the default bases. Or, if you need something really custom, you can just upload your own spritesheet entirely, so you could have a completely different body type so long as it didn't exceed the maximum.
omggg what is this avatar builder im.... * vvv *
That link was a basic avatar builder I made for an Epic Week game two years ago, but it has a lot in common with what's being planned for making character avatars. At least, in terms of the basics.
What is your favorite candy?
My favorite candy is different per day, but I really really like fruit snacks
They are SO SATISFYING to bite.Can we see your code duckie if you have one?
My code duckie is actually my guinea pigs. They have listened to a LOT of me ranting about how to make creating new objects/tiles very flexible but also not so complicated people won't do it over the last few months
Do you have any kind of Christmas themed event planned for the RPR kim or is it just the winter art trade?
I try to avoid specific religious holidays, but winter is often a busy time for RPR events. As you mentioned, there's the winter art trade, but in December there will also be FOBETEO (The Festival of Being Excellent to Each Other), which is an OOC event about being nice to each other, expressing appreciation for friendships, and exchanging kudos, and the Winter Masquerade, which is a day-long live IC event
I actually have a suggestion, but it is pretty vague, since I don't really know how it would work exactly: If there could be some sort of option to mark a group as a specific timezone, or in some way search for specific timezones. Maybe it is a very small problem, I don't really know how many people here are Europeans. But the main reason I don't join groups on this site, is because I am afraid of potentially slowing the other people down all the time, since my timezone is so different. I also find that some of my RP-partners find it discouraging that I am rarely online when they are, which means we can't have like 'at night of rp'. It might just be an unnecesary thing for everyone to suddenly spend time on. But I don't know, I just thought I would mention it, in case someone just had a magical great solution to that, hahaha
Oh, interesting thought. I'll definitely think about this!
I have had a request to give groups a default timezone in the past, for people who use them as websites for their RP group and wanted the calendar to show events at a certain time even if most of the viewers weren't logged in and therefore didn't have their own timezone set. Which, you know, I've never been against at all. It just never climbed that high up the priority list since it aimed mostly at people who were not site members, and there were other things on the list for people who were, and they tended to win out
Remember, the living library event is still going on this weekend! It's a super fun and fascinating way to learn more about the RPR community and the world around you.
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Zelphyr
November 19, 2022
10:55pm