Costom Banners

[Icefalcon]

Ya know what would be really cool... if there was a NPC that makes costom banners/flags for your guild. You would tell him the URL for the image and he could make it for you in the game. Then you could hang in in your guild HQ or somethin. It would probably cost a lot of money to discourage people makeing 20 different banners each, or limit them only to guild leaders, and 1 per guild.

[Boldstorm]

This sounds somewhat like the idea that was being talked about like with costumes or insignias for guilds. I definetly like the idea of banners for guild houses and or other things like that. Wouldnt it be possible though to have a tailor in your guild that would be able to do this?

[Axsyrus]

i like that idea, but i think it would be better to have it in a local folder such as \"planeshift/custom\" or someting, so you can choose from all images you\'ve stored in there.

[Commando]

Say like this...

--BASICLY--
U pays the NPC and he sets up the banner.

---SERVER SIDE---
The NPC sends a command to the server to order all clients
to download that image.

--CLIENT SIDE--
The client checks if the image if downloaded or not, if it isn\'t it will download it, and if it is, it just load it

--SUMMURY--
This will make the ping drop VERY little for the clients, i mean, how big is a GIF or JPEG? max 50KB. Its a one time thing.


I like it

[elscouta]

*** File download reminds me something ***

I\'d prefer on the server side part:

the server advice the client to download the banner. I mean, if i\'m in battle, i don\'t want my bandwidth be used to download banners. It must probably put on a distant ftp server so the client can download it when it want.

[Kramy]

Or perhaps the banner could be sent as binary on a subchannel that isn\'t used for chatting, then ordered to reconstruct the file?

------------------------------

I wouldn\'t want my bandwidth used up in a battle either, but since I have broadband, it doesn\'t really matter.

[Moogie]

Hmmm.... how about this:

Guilds of a certain level would have the priviledge of creating a custom insignia or banner and submitting the file to the GMs for approval. There would be guildlines/rules for this, for example, the image must be no bigger than 100x100 and 10kb in size.

Then, whenever a player starts up his or her client, it would automatically check for new images and download them. It would only take a few seconds, even on dial-up, and means there will be no extra bandwidth usage in-game.

Think something like that could work?

[elscouta]

yes but what do you mean by \'guild of a certain level\'. Is it going to be level for guilds?

[lynx_lupo]

I think she meant level of renown. Only guilds that are worthy of banners would get them.

[leinir]

As I understand it, World of Warcraft has the Guild Banner thing. The way it is done there is that the Guild leader is required to make a banner, i.e. the flag type thing.

With regards to wanting to limit banners to only guilds that are worthy of it, that would seem a bit silly to me. I mean, in the real world are not everybody allowed to make up a guild or such organisation? I know it is in Denmark, though I\'m not sure about other places, obviously. Any such organisation is free to create a logo or insignia for themselves, and in PlaneShift, that would be the Guild Banner...

There are of course possible copyright problems with the guild banners. For example there is a company called WARP Graphics, who are responsible for the ElfQuest comics. Their logo has been used by quite a lot of people, and they have had a lot of legal problems with this. I would suggest not having a queued filtering process upon submission by the guild leader, since this would create unnessecary amounts of work for the GM, since of course by far most guilds would submit actual original artwork, but to let it be possible for any GM to easily see a list of recent guild changes, including these banners.

ok, I\'ll stop rambling now Just as an end note: The Guild Banners would be a great addition, and as mentioned above should not increase the connection load in any significant way, if the technical decisions are made to this effect (for example a black/white logo or insignia at even relatively high resolution would give a very small file size, the guild leader then chooses what to replace the black and white colours with (for example it could be black/white transformed into red/yellow)).

[THAPRINZE]

sounds good to me...but why not just do it like;  a guild leader can buy a banner.. and then the dev\'s gm\'s (whatever you wanna call them) just add the banner as an update, so that when you startup PS, it just checks the game and see if you have this update like in every other game that uses updates

[Zeraph]

As it was mentioned before this would cause allot of extra work for the gms, of course, what you can do is have the submitter agree to a license agreement that the work of art is there responsibility, Planeshift is not responsible for any breach of copyright etc. & have a user-controlled reporting system, were if someone sees a banner that is out-of-taste or something they can report it so a gm can check it out & remove it. Also the server will not accept any image over 15k or something to limit file size. What could happen is if a user needs the image instead of that image being downloaded through a long update of maybe 200 guild logos they can only download them when they are needed, if an image is not downloaded already the banner will read ?Download in Progress? & then after it downloads (which shouldn?t take long even with dialup) the image shows.

This could work with tattoos & stuff also, also an option to turn this sort of downloading off into a queue then you can download it later just as an option, I personally want auto-download myself. :]