in CoH I loved the ability to hover over a character and get their "bio". I spent literally hours just standing in Pocket D on Virtue and digging the creativity of other players.
Naturally, I'd like something similar in CoT. I think this may have been been discussed before, but it's been a while, at least, and as we get closer to the CC coming available it's worth bringing up again. Some ideas:
1) Bio/history section (Like CoH had) Just a text field where you can tell your story.
2) More characters than CoH's 1024(iirc) in the aforesaid field. But not unlimited. Maybe double? 2048? Thoughts?
3) "Vital Statistics" fields, height, weight, etc. I think it would be neat if these were linked to the Character Creator somehow. So that as you build the avatar, those stats automatically populate the appropriate fields in your Dossier.
4) the ability to edit the above stats freely. (To reflect different physiologies; densities, ethereal qualities, etc.)
5) The ability to have any field designated as "Secret", so they don't display for casual hovering, but could be "unlocked" for specific characters. (I can give your character 'permission' to read my entire Dossier)
6) Link to outside web URL. (I know this can be troublesome, but it's easy to put in the "You are leaving official CoT territory, we are not responsible for content..." barrier that you have to click through)
7) It might be nice to be able to post a screen shot or two, but I expect that would be problematic from the perspective of insuring the PG13 rating. Maybe if they were only available from a locked game file? so that you couldn't just paste a random porn jpg from your HD, but it comes from a file that is specifically an un-edited game-play file. (I dunno. That's beyond my tech savvy and may be more trouble than its worth)
What else?
On a wild tangent from this I also think it would be nice to be able to copy another player's costume. It didn't happen often, but every once in a while I'd see a costume that I had no idea how to make. I'm sure it's not that simple given that some costume pieces are not available to everyone, but I still think it would be nice if it's doable. If it's done well it could even promote sales of costume pieces.
"THE TITANS ARE COMING! THE TITANS ARE COMING!"
I recall Wildstar doing something like that. You basically could save the character build that you created as a code and then give that code out to anyone who wanted to use it.
The art forums or the character threads had quite a few people doing this.
Formerly known as Bleddyn
[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WCqnt88Umk]Do you want to be a hero?[/url]
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This feature request has already been made multiple times. At this point, pretty much all of us are expecting it to be a standard feature, complete with export/import to .txt file support and everything so that we can post "builds" not just of Mids' Hero Planner but also of costume designs.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Thank you Redlynne. I suspect you've read a few more posts than me. In fact, I suspect you've posted more than I've read. I hope the devs also consider it an expectation.
"THE TITANS ARE COMING! THE TITANS ARE COMING!"
I like the idea of an expanded Bio section. 1024 is just too small and it's only text. I can't see such a small change harming the system.
The idea to copy another's costume has some merit. If players want a themed SG or party costume for example.
I also like the export idea. I'm not the best designer but I came up with some nice stuff. It would be great to be able to share how I got the look on a forum. This could also encourage new players who might feel intimidated by the CC's many options to try new stuff.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
Yes to a comprehensive BIO section.
One thing I would like to see is for the Role-Players. A section for Public Domain information and a section for non-PD information so you could have what's known about the Hero/Villain in one section vs what's not in the Public Domain yet in another.
Not sure how useful it would be but I just thought it might interest the Role-Players out there.
We all have it in us to be a hero to someone,
Super powers are optional.....
Part of the Phoenix Rising Initiative.....
Proud to be a hero. Prouder still to be a member of [url=http://www.watchfire-online.info]Watchfire[/url]
As much as I hated running up against the 1024 character limit on bios myself, I do have to admit that the limit served a GOOD purpose ... preventing the [b]WALL OF TEXT[/b] from occurring in a Bio entry. It's not enough to have to merely [i]write[/i] all of that, but you also have to recognize that people are going [i]read[/i] it also, and once you start getting beyond 1000 characters of text, it can stop being a passing fancy and start becoming an INVESTMENT of TIME to actually Stop & Read someone's Bio.
I actually ran into this ... er, problem ... when writing up my Inverse Ninja Law arc in Architect Entertainment. I was writing up stuff for my NPC Contact for the missions (Midnight Sun, a Tsoo Lawyer) and kept bumping up against the character limits for dialogue chat from the NPC. So I was editing things down so as to "fit" within the limits of what was permissible. But then when I was actually [i]running[/i] the published arc, to playtest it and debug it, I realized that I was creating [b]WALLS OF TEXT[/b] and started wondering if anyone would ever bother with stopping and reading ANY of it as opposed to just clicking right through an not bothering to read anything.
I suspect that the 1024 character limit, while at times frustrating (for those of us with a LOT to say) also imposed a sort of discipline towards brevity that is needed in the context of the function being served. Just like how nobody likes to "walk" from one end of the map to another, voluntarily, hardly anyone enjoys reading dissertations masquerading as Bio text either ... or as Mission Contact "blah blah blah" text. Anything over 1024 characters to write is going to require [b]STOPPING PLAY[/b] to sit down and READ in its entirety, and there are a LOT of Players (and a lot of situations) where people simply won't "sit still" long enough for that to happen, even with a 1024 character limit. Needless to say, this sort of "c'mon, let's GO already!" mentality generates even more conflict as the character limit increases.
So from a purely logistical and "human players" nature point of view, I'd recommend NOT increasing the character limit on Bios beyond 1024 characters, even as annoying as that limit can be at times. Why? Because brevity has value in a game where the people playing it have the attention span of fruit flies.
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Amazingly enough on at least 3 or 4 different occasions I specifically remember typing up a new character's Bio in CoH and having it come in at around 1060 or 1080 characters. It was annoying having to go back and wordsmith bit and pieces of my text just to get it down to the 1024 limit.
I can see the merits of restricting the amount of text space allowed to some degree because as The Bard suggested, "Brevity is the soul of wit" but I'd have no problem if CoT gave us say a 2048 character limit because 1024 was simply far too small for anything more than a couple of non-descriptive sentences.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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For what it's worth even if CoT gave us say a 2048 character Bio limit no one would be forced to read anyone's Bio that actually used all 2048 characters. I'd agree I wouldn't bother reading someone's novel-length Bio if the game allowed it, but 2048 (or even a number like 1200 or 1600) isn't excessively too much regardless if you care to read it or not. *shrugs*
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I guess a better question then is ... where is the "tipping point" between brevity and excess? 1024 is a "convenient number" simply because of the powers of 2 which is useful for binary code reasons. Perhaps one of the database management people would care to inform us about the tradeoffs concerning specific character counts for Bio entries so that we could make an informed decision concerning the balancing of multiple priorities (including optimization).
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
In the City, every character I made had a bio block. Most were right around 250 characters, but a few filled up the entire 1024 character limit. Assuming an average of five characters per word (4+space), 1024 provides enough room for just over 200 words. A standard letter size sheet of paper with 1" margins and 12pt type holds an average of 250 words. It takes an average person around 90 seconds to read one page.
I mention all of this to support RedLynne's assertion that the "arbitrary" 1024 character limit is actually a blessing in disguise. For a character bio block meant to be read at a glance, anything over one typed page very quickly becomes problematic. With more than one page of text most players will not bother to read your beautiful prose nor stop to appreciate your poetic description of how your character achieved their metahuman status. It's simply not going to happen. Therefore, those long dissertations on life, liberty, and the pursuit of greatness are of use to no one but their creator.
Sorry, but dem's da facts.
Like many others, I enjoyed hanging out in Pocket D reading bio blocks on Virtue. Often I would plant a character on the second floor of the VIP lounge and click on every character who came through Pocket D's VIP portal looking for a fast transition between maps. Other servers were sometimes entertaining, but Virtue was definitely the home of the hardcore RP crowd and their bio blocks showed it.
The worst thing a player could do with the CoX bio block was enter 1024 characters of solid text with no paragraph breaks. Unless that first sentence was completely genius, most of those I never bothered reading.
Programmers were always a kick. Trying to puzzle through 15-20 lines of code in assembly or some other low level language was a real work out. C++ or Java were a breeze, but the best ones were written in C or Pascal. BASIC was sometimes cool, sometimes not, depending on which version the writer was familiar with.
Good times!
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I support a longer bio block. The 'average word' comparison does not really work, since it was a Character-limit, counting spaces and punctuation, not Words. However, for the sake of Brevity, how about an internal 'browser' that would allow a link to a longer dossier?
Be Well!
Fireheart
Fireheart, if you're going to go to that extent, you're honestly better off with some sort of out of the game yet still tied to the character kind of functionality running through a web browser.
I know that there are games out there which allow you to look up characters for a game through a feature on a company's website. Blizzard has a habit of doing an "armory" type of deal with that kind of functionality. I would say that if you wanted to write reams of text, putting it on the web browser side of looking up a character ... rather that inside the game itself ... would be the place to do so. Reading lots of text through a web browser is practically Default Mode rather than a deviation from the norm. That way, you keep the brief Bio inside the game and have the space for a longer Bio entry outside of the game, if you want it. Call the in-game thing a Bio and the out-of-game thing a Dossier, just to prevent confusion of terminology.
All you'd need then, inside the game, to tell people "hey, I've written up a Dossier! go read it on the website!" would be a On/Off UI element in the Bio indicating that a Dossier for the character has been written. How does that sound to you?
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Redlynne, of course you're right, and I Often run my own multi-tabbed browser behind any game I'm playing, as well as other applications, just because that's how I roll. I'm used to multi-threading my tasks. I would encourage a link to Titan Network or City Info Tracker, or a similar site.
Or the character data on the server could include a more comprehensive (optional) dossier than the old 'bio block' would handle.
Be Well!
Fireheart
It's a bad habit of mine. I'll stop doing it eventually ...
/em shrug
Huh. I don't do that. I play fullscreen (not windowed), and while playing I play with a singular focus on the game. I've had too many game clients crash out on me when switching to other windows/applications and now avoid doing that sort of thing as much as possible/practical. Now that I've got an iPad, my personal preference is to use my "not a computer" to go look stuff up while I'm playing computer games simply because it allows me to not mess with the Alt+Tab risks involved with a memory leaky game client. Sometimes that isn't practical (copy/pasting long URLs, for example), but for quick wiki lookups the iPad functions adequately as a sort of "heads down" extra window for me.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Sorry, but dem's mostly your opinions/assumptions.
The 1024 limit might have been fine if it didn't also include all the "whitespace" characters (including punctuation and paragraphs). In practice what you could usually get into a CoH Bio was far less "descriptive" than the rosy assumptions you've made here.
Again ultimately if a person is going to BOTHER to read your Bio at all it's going to need to be interesting regardless if it's 250, 1024 or 2048 characters long. There were plenty of Bios out there that were much shorter than the 1024 limit that I didn't finish reading because they didn't even "hook" me in the first few dozen words or so. Extreme brevity does not always guarantee absolute genius. On the other hand if someone produced a clever write-up it wouldn't have upset me to have read a few more words beyond what the 1024 cutoff allowed for.
I think it's agreed effectively no one wants to read phonebook sized Bios (either in-game or via third-party link) but for what it's worth something like a 2048 character in-game limit would not destroy the universe either. Again no one will force you to read any Bio regardless of length, but if someone can produce something interesting in the extra space beyond 1024 characters there is no technical limitation (in 2015-16) to prevent it.
In a nutshell 2048 would be a more reasonable compromise between having "no Bio" length and "infinite Bio" length for this new game than 1024 (including whitespace) was. It's certainly possible 1024 was chosen for CoH in part because of the typical bandwidth considerations of the 2004 timeframe, but given the general progress made in the last 12+ years it's going to be incredibly hard for any Dev to justify that being a significant engineering concern today.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Ah, but Redlynne, you have also been... mistaken a time or two. I don't hold that against you, your average has been quite good.
I will admit that the old 1024 did force me to get creative with my bios. Most of the time, I solved the issue with Poetry! However, having a bigger buffer would be much better.
Be Well!
Fireheart
It's always the exceptions that prove the rule. Nobody's "perfect" ... especially me. Past performance does not predict future results, and all that. Still, it's nice to know I'm doing better than 50/50.
Agreed. I had a few Bios that "wanted" to be longer than 1024 characters, and when I hit that limit it simply forced me to Get Creative in order to stay under that limit. I just wish the carriage returns hadn't eaten up as many characters out of the limit as they did in order to produce line breaks. Still, as frustrating as it could be, the limit did enforce a ... discipline ... of writing that otherwise wouldn't have had to be there, which I don't consider to be a bad thing.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I mostly agree with this, though I would suggest going with a word limit of 300 rather than a character limit. 300 is a single paperback page, so that should more than suffice, and going by words prevents the annoying 'the last two characters won't fit' problem
I-Guess-That-Might-Work_If_Players_dont-try~and`get`around`that`limitation. :D
Yep if the limit was word-based there'd be nothing keeping anyone from typing something like "antidisestablishmentarianism" 300 times in a row (which would be 8,400 characters by the way). A character-based limit makes sense because at least it has something to do with data storage and message bandwidth concerns - the only rationale a word based limit would serve is as a negatively arbitrary restriction on player creativity.
Again I can sympathize with those who want a small limit for this - I just think CoH's 1,024 limit was TOO small. 2,048 characters would once again be a reasonable compromise for pretty much everyone. Use it if you want; don't use it if you don't want.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Unicode support?
The support for Unicode in CoT will obviously depend on how the Devs choose to handle it. IIRC CoH allowed for some types of Unicode when it first launched but at some point they patched the game to prevent any new use of it because they had problems with the way their system dealt (or in fact didn't deal) with it.
I'd have to hope that being able to properly process and display Unicode characters would be something relatively simple for an in-game text feature created in the 2015/16 timeframe so maybe it'll be allowed in CoT. As for how it would impact any max character limit I'd leave that to the Devs. It'd be cool if they would count each graphic character as "one character" as far as any limit goes, but it'd be understandable if they had to count all the control code characters needed to describe a single Unicode character against the absolute max total.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]