So, while all may seem quiet right now, in fact, a lot has been happening on the back end. I've been busy for the past week making adjustments to polish the website, particularly when it comes to character management. To those who've already brought some of these to my attention, these are the "interface improvements" I've been promising.
Character Management
- Added character management links to the character sheet. Now when you're looking at an NPC or monster of your own creation (or, if you're an administrator, when you're looking at any character), you will see little plusses and minuses in all the right places. No more need to delete and recreate a character; now you can roll back changes on an individual basis.
- Made game stats (level, skills, actions, etc.) on character sheets invisible to anyone but the characters' owners and game administrators. This should pave the way for a public character directory. Written your bios yet?
- Added a list of racial actions beneath class actions on character sheets. Note that you can't directly unlearn racial
actions; to remove them, you have to instead unlearn the skill that grants them. - Druid characters will now automatically unlearn any previously-known Shapeshift actions when they learn a new Shapeshift action. This will likely be similar for Animates and Summons for warlocks and wizards.
- When you add a new skill or action to a character, you will now see a preview of the skill or action you select right beneath the drop-down menu.
Skill Acquisition
- Fixed the bug Bronson found on Saturday that allowed him to buy more ranks in Weapon Specialization than he had levels.
- The prompt for specifying a skill variation now says, "You must specify a variation for...," which I think is a lot clearer.
- Added racial skills as a category in the skill selection drop-down. This should help make them a little more obvious.
- Reorganized the skill selection menu using optgroups. Now the skills are neatly grouped and you can't inadvertently select the group labels.
- I couldn't find a way to disable individual select options short of not listing them, so I couldn't gray out skills in the skill selection drop-down for which the character didn't have enough skill points. Instead, I opted to add a simple "Current Skill Points" read-out to the skill acquisition form.
Miscellaneous Interface Improvements
- Installed a lightbox module to allow easier browsing through image galleries.
- Added some styling to the image galleries and status messages on the site.
- Fixed some problems in Internet Explorer where the "Log In" and "Join the Adventure" buttons at the top weren't visible.
- Styled forums a bit more so that the main forum topics appear just like the comments, complete with the time and user picture.
- I hacked the home page title attribute to correctly use, "The Shards of Orn | Raleigh, NC Live Action Roleplaying Game (LARP)." This one's only really relevant to me, but I thought I'd list it anyway just to be thorough.
- I stylized the "View, History, Edit" tabs to make them look a bit more like buttons.
- Added a "Usable By:" list to action details pages.
- On the skill page, I added the names of each race that can use the skill next to each racial skill.
- Added a "Current Boon Total" heading to the boon log page. You can find this by clicking on your user name when you're logged in and selecting "Boon" at the top of the "My account" page. Right now, all you can do is receive boon awarded to you, but I plan to change that in the near future.
Planned Features
I've still got plenty of features left to program. Most of those, like the boon system and the treasure trove, deserve their own list. However, here are some smaller interface improvements I have in mind for first season release.
- Preserved Menu States. Menus will remain open for the section you're currently viewing.
- Character Pics. You will be able to upload a publicly-viewable picture of your character.
- Character Directory. A listing of every PC and NPC in the game, with thumbnailed pictures and links to their public page.
- In-Play Forums. Sure, we've got the forums already, but wouldn't it be cool if you could post to them as your character rather than yourself? On top of that, wouldn't it be cool if your character's picture showed up instead of your ordinary avatar?
As always, if you notice anything not working as it should, or if you have a feature you'd like to request, don't hesitate to let me know about it.