There are a couple final features/fixes I’m working on, and of course if you guys find any more bugs I’ll fix those too. But is there anything else you feel is desperately missing?
If not, I think the final hurdle is putting the code through the paces on the new game I’m working on. If that’s solid, then I think I’ll be comfortable declaring a 1.0 release.
Not that anything magical happens with 1.0 of course … it’s more of a psychological milestone and a vote of confidence for people wanting to use it on their games.
I mean, I have a wishlist, but I’m not sure that /desperately missing/ is the term I’d use.
One thing I am noticing as I move on to web portal stuff is that web CG still feels a little clunky. Having to ‘reset’ a character before you can view attributes and skills feels weird, as does the fact that you can’t reset again from the web if you want to start over. Also, just customizing-wise for people who aren’t comfy poking code, it might be nice if all the cg-tips were in the config files so that people could put game-specific instructions in them.
The biggest item on my wishlist is admin-side - it’d be really cool if I could view apps and approve them from the web portal. I’m right there doing jobs, and it feels weird to be like ‘oh, I have to log into the game to do that’ when so much other character stuff is web-side. But that’s a bigger sort of wish.
Overall, though, I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with Ares and am pretty excited about moving into our own alpha phase. The stuff it can already do is already worlds beyond what I’d imagined a year go.
Thanks for the feedback! Unfortunately the ‘reset’ step is kind of unavoidable. You need to set your groups, faction, colony, etc. before you can initialize your abilities with the required profession skills. It’s not something I feel should be automated, because there’s no way for the system to tell when the player is happy with those settings other than them saying “Yep, go ahead and move onto skills.” I could add back a subsequent reset easily enough, but I didn’t really see it coming up too often.
Cg-tips and web apps are good suggestions - thanks!
In that case, maybe consider a term other than ‘reset’? It feels like confusing terminology for something that you use at the beginning, but then can’t use again. Possibly ‘set default values’ or… something similar but shorter and catchier.
Well it mirrors the reset command in-game, which really does reset your skills to starting abilities and can be used more than once.
Double ETA: Though it would be trivial to name the button “Start Abilities” if that helps any.
Technically-speaking it’s easy to make the reset button available even after you’ve used it once – I just haven’t found a good place to put it. Everywhere I try it’s very clunky.
ETA: For example, this box could appear at the bottom of attrs/skills/languages/advantages but with the save and submit boxes at the top/bottom I just feel like it’s a lot of clutter and information overload. Just not sure it’s worth it for the odd case where somebody wants to blast their skills completely and start fresh.
Ha. And we did actually rename the button for that reason.
If you do make it persistent, I would probably put it up top with the cg-tip. You could probably do just the button without the added room of the box/text. Naming it ‘Reset Abilities to Default’ gets across pretty much the same thing, I think.
I agree that it’s unlikely to come up often, but I’m also looking at it from the perspective of doing CG pretty much entirely on the web, with game-based commands serving more as an admin back-up.
I went ahead and renamed the first one to “Start Abilities”.
I’m a bit leery of having the button without the description text, because a) someone might get confused and think that it only reset the abilities on that particular screen, or b) they might worry that it is going to reset their name/groups/etc. too. So I think I’m just going to leave the reset off. It would be convenient to have (which is why there’s an in-game command to do it) but you don’t strictly need it to complete CG entirely on the web.
I also added the other things you suggested. They’re in v22. Thanks!
Understood! That’s probably not going to go into 1.0 but it’s definitely on the list of ideas for the future. Many of the web portal systems are pretty minimal - channels, forums, jobs, mail, combat, etc. - but they can all be expanded if people actually use them.
Understandable. Judging from current levels of enthusiasm from my alpha players, I think the web portal aspect of just like… managing your OOC life. Is going to be very popular.
Also, are there commands to see available stances and specials that I’m missing? If not, those would be helpful.
That’s good to know, thanks! The alpha players on BSGU didn’t use it too much (though admittedly it only got fully developed in the latter half of the game’s life) and T8S didn’t use the web portal really at all, so… that colored how much work I put into it.
The weapon <name> command will show you what specials are available for that weapon.
There isn’t a command to list stances, but since you can add custom stances I should probably add one.
… it’s more of a psychological milestone and a vote of confidence for people wanting to use it on their games.
