November Office Hour Highlights

Posted by Kim on November 16, 2024, 2:30pm

Missed this month's office hours? Never fear, here's the Qs and As you missed!

Why was the most recent art trade skipped? I missed the one before!
Yeah, sorry about that. The honest answer is because I was/am struggling with crippling depression post the election and getting my normal tasks done has been a struggle. I didn't feel I could take on running anything extra this month and do a good job of it.

What do you see happening in the future with RP Repository?
Oh, golly, what an open ended question! I have a few answers, though I think it might not be the thing you're hinting at.

1) In the next few months I see some behind the scenes upgrades being done that will make it easier to hook in some front-end upgrades and new features that are coming down the pipeline. That sounds pretty vague, and it is, but it'd be the type of plumbing we'd need to release, say, mini-apps that do certain aspects of RPR stuff, like chats or pet care. I have a couple in half-built stages that I can't finish releasing until I do some much much more boring updates.
2) I think we're going to see the tile editor and avatar editor release for testing early in 2025, so people can start fussing with some patches prior to actual maps release.
3) Bringing in more mods is super likely as well.

How is Operation Terra Incognita going?
Slower than I would like, once again -- I had a really astonishingly bad Quarter 3. I won't go into too much detail but it involved multiple pets needing me to give them hospice care and then dying and then my getting REALLY SICK for close to a month (First a two week mega flu, a week break, then I got COVID for the first time and was half convinced I wasn't gonna make it. My partner had to take me to the ER multiple times.) That sort of thing makes it very hard to do creative projects after client work. >.>

I've been trying to find my stride with it again, and am stumbling into more of a groove again. RPR is still my baby and my favorite thing to work on.

Expanding parts of the site into mini-apps sounds like the kind of overhead that will let you do even more impressive stuff in the future, if time, energy, and hands are available!
I'm hoping that's the case! Some of the heaviest lifting is still going to be website only, but I think it would be very nice to be able to carry on an existing RP in a lighter weight app. Technology is getting to the point where it's easier to produce multi-platform apps without having to maintain each one totally separately.

Is Oil of Epicness edible? If so, what does it taste like? And does that apply to other epicness oils?
It's meant to be applied topically.

Wait, what does Epic Oil smell like?
It has sort of an amber base, crisp papyrus mid notes, and sparks of magic as finishing notes.

I feel like that's going to make more of us want to drink it.
I cannot stress this enough -- apply it *topically*. I am not responsible for any unplanned transmogrifications should you imbibe it!

Official epic oil drink when?
Clearly I missed a trick during the lemonade stand fundraiser

I put a little on the inside of a rolling paper and ... ka-bang!
EXTERNAL APPLICATION! SMOKING IT DOES NOT COUNT!

small amounts of diluted Epic Oil being written as an ingredient in some potions for Epic Week or something in the future would be a really cool bit of flavortext. 0 v0
Ooh, it certainly would. I hope it wouldn't make people panic they had to buy things to participate though!

If it were just flavor text on ancient, powerful potions we find or something that might solve it?
Either that or being specific that it's the dilute stuff, mixing with the pure stuff is TOO much oomph.
Haaaaa! Maybe we need some EW lore that reveals a bit about how it's made. Sounds like an idea for 2026. *thinking*

Oooo, could a giant, ancient magical/steampunk alchemical factory complex be in our future? : 3
Anything is possible in EW!

Unified RPR lore possibilities for the win!
There's a surprisingly large amount of it out there! I love discovering it.

Since we have a canonical flavor/scent for epic oil, someone with editor perms should deffo put that in the lore wiki if they haven't already. 0 v0 It must be noted for posterity! ^v^
Editor perms are easy to get, btw! You just have to answer some questions about the rules and if you get them right you automatically get them.

I hope you've had an opportunity to write for RPs of your own recently! We love that you're supporting all of ours, but hopefully that isn't keeping you from your own adventures!
I've been doing a whole lot of Vampire RP lately. Both in online text RP and also at LARPs

Since I wanted to document the scent and taste of Epic Oil, I've started making and organizing a shelf and books for the items of RPR! In the process I came up with a few questions which I wanted to check in with you on and which I did not see in the editorial guidelines. If a page covers the same topic as another page in a different book on a different shelf, is it better to just link to that page, or put in the full entries and also reference that page? Something else? This is mostly for the Epic Week items, namely healing items where it will be almost completely the same page, but also for general precedent.
I think whether to link, copy, etc. will depend a lot on what the two different pages are focused on. The Epic Week page about items generally only talks about how the items can be used in EW gameplay, but not so much about shop sales, so they do have two distinct reasons for being. In these cases, a "more information can be found at ..." will often be the easiest and make the most sense to prevent duplicate effort.

Where can we see the Page ID Numbers, and what will they look like? It doesn't actually say or have an example in the guidelines.
When you go to edit a page, the url will be like rprepository com/lore-wiki/edit-page/210 That last number is the page id. You don't always need this, most of the time you can use the wiki style links, but if two different pages have the same name then you can differentiate them with their IDs

Can a page be in multiple books, or a book be on multiple shelves? I don't think I need that right now, but it seems good to know going forward.
Great question. For conceptual ease, they function more or less like real books and pages which can only be in one physical location at a time.

That book-location rule makes sense! Also I'm now imagining using the mapping tool you're working on to make a functional map of the Lore Wiki library. I have no idea if that would ever work, but it's a fun thought.
WHOA what a cool idea, holy crap.

I've sent a few bug reports over the last year and none of them has gotten any reply, so I've been wondering if there has been some issue with them, or some other reason?
I see two open ones right now, one from October - this is an open issue I'm still working on, no updates yet. The other is from a bit earlier this month, which is something I did fix in the moment I received it but haven't gotten around to closing out the reports and sending the accolades yet. >.>

It's been a weird month. Set of months.

I try to be decent about responding in a timely manner, but this year has been... very bad. The one you sent me in October arrived smack dab when I had COVID and was being taken to the ER a bunch, so I got a bit behind there. I really apologize about that. There is no issue on your end, you're doing the right thing.

When are we getting guinea pigs for pets on the RPR? It's canon after all that we have astronaut piggies
omg that would be soooo cute. No current plans, but who knows!

Just imagine the vast variety of coat colors and costumes to put on them. LGBTQIA+ shirts. Little dinosaur costumes too
omggg. I imagine we could also put some shirts on the hippocampi. The Phoenixes might burn them up. The rocks..... Most of them would just really have fabric draped on them.

May I suggest stickers for the rocks
*dead*

my RPR pen is out of ink after all these years, does a standard ink replacement tube fit in them?
That is a great question! I've never actually tried to replace the ink in them.

I'm trying to find info from the manufacturer and so far nothing. But when opened, their parts do look fairly standard - I think it's worth a try!

Please report back! I am fascinated to know.

(Someone else in the chat said: I just yanked a filling from a different ballpoint pen and it fits perfectly So 99.99% it's universal)

I'm gonna pick a wild color then. I was thinking turquoise?
I am stoked about the idea of making a set of special colored RPR pens now.

What is the sand in the Hourglass of Epicness made of?
My current headcanon is that it's precipitate from Epic Oil being distilled or mixed with some other kind of reagent or something, but I'd be just as excited by other answers!
It's a mix of different magic components, but one of the main ones is mica powder sourced from meteorites. This is not a food-grade sort of mica. Do not eat!

Meteorite mica sounds like it'll give me superpowers though...
*weeps* If the superpower is Epicness, yes. When applied topically

Wait, does that imply that we have to break the hourglasses and pour them out onto ourselves to benefit from them?
Yes, that is one way to gain the benefits. There are several popular rituals to activate the magic. None of them involve ingestion!

But it is self-evident that all methods "consume" the hourglass in one way or another.

Not the eating kind of consume! Just the using up kind!

Is the be excellent to each other kudo thi g on in December this year?
Yes, the Festival of Being Excellent to Each Other will start on December 2nd this year.

Next: Snowball fight! » « Previous: November Office Hours Today (Friday) and Tomorrow (Saturday)

Comments

Shinyrainbowlithogra

November 20, 2024
11:00pm

I remembered just now that I recently read something about cinnamon. This being that merchants used to tell stories about how they lured a dangerous bird in order to get the cinnamon, making the bird drop it or somehow plotting to knock it out of their nests. Thus they kept the trade closed and secret... reminded me of the phoenixes and cinnamon sticks!

Kim