PlaneShift
Support => Complaint Department => Topic started by: Velh Krome on July 05, 2008, 05:37:59 am
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I noticed that books' contents no longer can be saved in a local textfile, unless you were the creator - is it a bug or a "feature"?
When it was introduced I considered it a great feature to be able to save books on your harddrive. Being able to only do that with your own books doesnt make much sense to me. If you file a future book-content on your harddrive for getting it ingame later on, why would one want to save it locally again? So it actually made only sense (to me) to store books created by other people, and I liked it!
Or is it somehow connected to books acquired before 0.4.01?
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I think it is a feature and I believe it will prevent people from "stealing". Before if I offered to let someone read my book, they could just save it and have the book. It makes it kinda hard to sell books in game that way, :)
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Makes sense, somehow.. but only half-way: I could think of just screenshooting books otherwise..
In my opinion actually only people spending money on books that are somewhat "into RP" anyway, and books maybe will never be that valuable that one may become rich by selling them.
However, considering taking screenshots, this (lost) feature could have served for convenience, so if it was removed intentionally.. shame.
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It would make sense that only the creator of a book could read/write its contents, including saving it.
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I dunno a bigger deal to me is no longer being able to save crafting books as they are laid out poorly and not conducive to searching. I can see how you wouldn't want to make it easy to forge someone else's book but an kind of ambivalent about the whole thing.
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Did they really just implement DRM for in-game books??? What is soo wrong with saving books to read offline? People complain about not interacting with people in-game while mining, while killing critters, etc. Now people are going to complain about not interacting while trying to read books too. Maybe you could create a new action where a character sprawls under a tree and looks like he/she is reading...
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That is what I would do. :)
/me looks for more animators to hire.
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bigger deal to me is no longer being able to save crafting books
Why I just think it's a pretty pants idea I can describe in an easy example:
My char is a hunter. One may think he knows about beast, its habit and appearances from having met them, hunt them and being approached by them!
But instead I can use my time to RP him in fact being in the wilds, I have to have him standing in the library now reading a book! Of course, I could as well memorize all the dozens of books at once, for I am aware of what would my char see be merely opening his eyes (literally: same goes for having a clue how his nightvision works), or I could just always have an alt positioned in the library in case I need to know how was an ogoro which is about to mess around his home.. seriously, that rule about having all obvious ingame knowledge only accessible ingame appears quite a bit stupid to me. You dont seriously want to have people RP gaining obvious knowledge by reading books instead of RPing to "be"?
To become a bit sarcastic, for making my point clearer: The current description of races, shouldnt that whole (obsolete) Guide get removed for containing "spoilers"? What will be next? Having to go ingame before I know how will my char's model look like at all?
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Hm, I've made a lot of mentions of this, but if common knowledge books can't be copied, remove them and add them to the website. Constantly I read that book "Races of Yliakum", and it sounds like it's saying "Welcome to Yliakum! It's a stalactite that acts as a melting pot of races, etc. etc.". It doesn't sound like ANY citizen of Yliakum wrote it, it's just there for the hell of it.
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you want to see a change me a detailed feature request on the bug tracker and we can get talad to take a look at it.
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I actually do not mind the in-game books not being savable and I have already made a bug report/feature request (http://www.hydlaa.com/flyspray_upgrade/index.php?do=details&task_id=1632&pagenum=3) about the crafting books. It does not seem to be going anywhere. I have also tried to get some people in the game to create books for spell and food recipes, a crafting book along those lines would also be good. If I really want a copy of an ingame book I can always take a screen shot of it. Then I'd need to transcribe or OCR it.
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Instead of copy/storing to your hard drive, wouldn't it be better for your RP just to be able to 'recall' the books you already read ingame? Add a little button that says [Memorize] instead of [Save] for non-copy books.
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Another idea is that there is a option that the writer can choose to decide if you can save the book or not.
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Honestly, I don't like the idea of saving any ingame book to your HD and being able to make a bunch of copies. I would much rather keep it completely ingame, as per this: http://hydlaa.com/smf/index.php?topic=29981.msg343752#msg343752
'Saving' and 'pasting' books is OOC. This would create new, skill-based jobs.
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You mean like you could at any time press any button "Remember books read" and a list shows up with titles of book already read, and you can choose one for its content to be shown?
Sounds indeed like a very comfy way to have such knowledge added to a char, and appearing both, more natural as per RP and more technically matured, to me.
Thumbs up, neat idea!
Same could work for chars having reached certain skill-levels in, i dont know.. authoring or printing: You could have written texts ingame once and be able to reproduce/copy them into empty books.
Both these options would require or provide some sort of menu, a "Mind-Menu".
The only thing I wonder is, if these texts were still stored locally? To have them sent between client and server would prolly waste bandwidth?
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I too, am annoyed and upset by not being able to save books as text, for later reading. This change is not a positive one, it lessens the game, and makes it much less enjoyable and more difficult to play. This is not a good thing.
The ingame interface for reading books is horrible at present, and while it does need a complete rewrite/redesign, I do believe that whatever solution will be reached will not be as suitable as what can be done with text files in a "proper" editor/office program.
If nothing else, having text files stored locally, will allow books to be read when the server is offline, badly lagged, or local internet is down.
I think that a history button to recall previously read books is a great idea, however this system should work from text files, which are stored locally on each player's hard drive.
E.
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Ah, just leave the bookcase examine window open and you can read the books in it anywhere in the world. I read the DR books in Gugrontid.
Of course I reported this as a bug but that is something else.
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Of course its not as comfortable, but you can just make some screenshots, patch them together in gimp/photoshop, and you will be having books' content available offline.
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you want to see a change me a detailed feature request on the bug tracker and we can get talad to take a look at it.
if you want a change i quote myself
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Agreed, I could raise yet another item in the bug tracker, I'm posting here to try to generate a discussion. It's more correct to have a discussion about development missteps here than in the bugs system imho.
I do wish the devs would stop 'fixing' things unnecessarily however. In this case, the ps team has worsened the gameplay and that will only serve to cost the game it's players/testers. You can't lose sight of the fact that players have real lives, and a finite amount of time to spend in character, in game. Too many decisions are being taken in the name of roleplay, that add nothing to the gameplay and general enjoyment .
That the old books system wasn't ideal, granted. The bodge has been created however, by removing the save button, not improving the gui, and forcing players to resort to pen& paper or screenshots is infinitely worse however.
E.
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Not all code changes are the fault of the devs. in this case i made this change but i did it with dev approval, before it was even commited. Now it is out of my hands or the devs. If you want this changed make a nice detailed feature request stating the exact reasons you want it back. It is now up to talad.
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You can't lose sight of the fact that players have real lives, and a finite amount of time to spend in character, in game
Quite true, and thats why I liked the now gone way so much! I felt like right this fact was taken into account. I could be ingame, open some books and save the content, and the next day I could read it during some breaks by day. Of course I can still do the same by taking screenshots, but knowing this way is in fact one not wanted and appreciated, the game and its development just feels less friendly.
To say I have to do all the reading when ingame, sorry, but I fail at seeing a good reason. When I am online I want to play the game, interact, develop, advance the plot and my chars, have fun! With books read during the breaks I could prepare myself a bit for the play in the evening time.
(Discussions on the bugtracker? I actually dont fancy to have to check one more forums like instance like this, sorry :-X)
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(Discussions on the bugtracker? I actually dont fancy to have to check one more forums like instance like this, sorry :-X)
If you make a comment on a bug you can "watch" it and it will then email you all further comments to that report.