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Unread 10-20-2017, 06:42 AM
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Garan Garan is offline
The Undying
Interface Author - Click to view interfaces
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Posts: 340
I've thought it might be neat to tie in stories to some of the NPCs or places that are special but not part of the existing stories - the boy under the steps in Bree, the Cat house in bree (where is the owner?), the rabbit cave, all of the killer bunnies on their bear skin rugs (there are a few scattered about), the cabin with goldilocks and the three bears, the mourners at the old graveyard north of Bree, etc. Lots of fodder for new stories.

I've got a 500 LP code floating around that I was planning to give away (I've got a ton of LP stored up on multiple accounts already), perhaps a story contest would be appropriate. If it is popular enough, perhaps you could even get SSG to sponsor prizes for regular, annual (or even more frequent) story contests (they've donated prizes to kin events before).

EDIT:
As to a prototype - I was making good progress before I got sidetracked by the annoying inability to change the height of the skinnable textbox controls (you can change regular ones but the skinnable ones use a fixed height background). The issue was that this plugin is most likely to appeal to role players. Role players seem to like either fancy skins that put them in the mood for their characters or "minimalist" skins that keep the UI from ruining their immersion. Either way, they seem to like skins. Add to that the amount of reading (and writing) in this plugin and I wanted the UI to be as scalable as possible so I started messing around with user selectable fonts and sizes with dynamic UI layout when I ran into the button issue. We can either have scaling button fonts or skinable button backs but not both. Frustrating. I finally settled on a compromise where the plugin automatically selects button font size by the largest font that fits on a button (about 22 pt) from the font family chosen by the user - the rest of the UI will use the full size font the user has chosen so the text will be easily readable.

Speaking of Feature Creep. As Thuralor commented, it is good to get something out, even if it doesn't have all of the desired features. Feature Creep is a term used by software designers to refer to the almost endless cycle of adding new features, implementing and testing them only to find more new features to add. That cycle can push a project's development waaaaaay past any reasonable delivery date. A friend of mine was working for years on a game engine but he kept adding new ideas faster than he could implement the old ones. I used to joke with him about the Feature Creep and one day he finally renamed the project "Feature Creep", splash screen and all (and no, it isn't finished yet ). So, while I've been listening to ideas and brainstorming, I haven't been idle. However, don't expect the prototype to have all the bells and whistles (but there will be a few nifty ones).

Last edited by Garan : 10-20-2017 at 09:26 AM.
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