OK, server crashed - again! Good moment to check the forums again. (BTW: Are server-crashes once every 1-2 hours normal or did I join with bad timing?)

Of course you can't just make some art and "donate" it to PlaneShift, it has to be made for PlaneShift. That's part of the reason for the proprietary license. Keep the feel of the game unified and unique.

Yeah, I got that (from the Google Talks vid). But I think it would depend on the content.
For example: A building or character should OF COURSE be PS-only, because you would recognize it.
On the other hand there's an incredible amount of small things, that take time to make, but wouldn't be that recognizable at all: textures (wood, stone, even a carpet ...), books, grass (right now every blade of grass seems to look the same), trees, small things like a mug and much more. That's the type of content I was talking about earlier. I was talking more of the basic "building blocks" you need to create the content, not the recognizable content itself.

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About my own contributions:

Right now I'm pretty sure I will contribute stuff. I was searching the "let's chat about tv and klick on monsters" grinder-jungle for a real online-RPG for days (and hit my head on the table when realizing that I forgot about Planeshift). So this is something I'm exited about now and when I'm exited about sth I start thinking how I can contribute. (That's why I called myselft "freedom-fanatic" in the last post.)

- Music: I'm musician, but I guess Drum'n'Bass, Glitch and Breakcore would hardly be the music you wanna hear in a fantasy environment.
- 2D: I know how to use Gimp, but that's about it.
- 3D: I never made any models - just some experimental fx-coding-stuff.

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Which brings us to Coding, and a question for the devs:

Warning! Much text ahead, but bear with me.
The question first: Is something like the stuff I explain below in the works already - so I don't reinvent the wheel if experimenting with that?

The only thing that REALLY pisses me off in PS are the NPCs. Although I love it that you have to talk to them, it just doesn't "work" (emotionally) in it's current state. Hunting for the right keyword just rips you out of your fantasy-world and kicks your ass back into reality at once. So I'm thinking about a way to make the pretty stupid NPCs not behave like - well - pretty stupid NPCs.

A few years ago I was working with different technologies for chat-bots that were supposed to assist people using natural language. Two things I had working perfectly was some kind of "fuzzy logic", that made the bot break down all (well most) sentences to a pre-defined logical minimum and the other way around.

Example:
"Could you please give me ItemX, Kaiman?", "Kaiman, I want ItemX.", "I seriously fucking need ItemX right now.", ...
would, after a few loops through the engine, all become "GIVE ME ITEMX"

The second fuzzy logic was the other way around: You were able to write a few answers by yourself and pick one of them at random. The engine would then take this and send it through a (also pre-defined) database of words/phrases that can be changed in every sentence without changing the meaning:
- "Bye" can become "Goodbye", "Farewell", "See you", "Have a nice day/evening/night/..." (depending on the time of day)
- "Can you" becomes "Could you", "Could you please", "Would you", "Would you please", ...
- Add ", Name." or just "." to the end of a sentence at random
and so on.

That way the same sentence always looks a little different, even when you ask the same thing over and over again.
Both things are defined in simple XML-files using the "AIML" language.

That would be pretty easy to make and has great advantages:
- It could be done in the client, so that the server would (in the perfect case) just have to know one question and one answer.
- The server doesn't need to parse all the strange ways of talking people can come up with
- That could IMHO reduce the traffic and especially the load on the server a lot.
- It would work by itself in the background, so the quest-authors don't need to think about it at all.

Is somebody working on sth like this? If not I will think about putting a small demo together and post a link, depending on the amount of spare time my self-employment leaves me with.

And the best thing: That would be a part of the engine (and free), so that the FOSS-war doesn't concern me! Yay!