ZacZero
I haven't seen this specifically addressed anywhere - all apologies if I overlooked it somehow.
I love the option to create information that is available only to specific players using the player secrets functionality.
I'd love to see this expanded upon and refined in the re-forging. Is this anywhere in the roadmap?
Comments
That being said, I have some radical ideas on how to vastly improve it, but the technical challenges are very steep. So, I don't want to get anyone's hopes up with my pie-in-the-sky ideas, since I'm not sure they're achievable yet.
I think putting secrets in the natural content of the page would make them much, much nicer. The only truly difficult part would be making it so OP only serves the player with the appropriate raw HTML; you don't want to make secrets display/not display via CSS, and you wouldn't want to do it via raw javascript, either.
EDIT: And yes, pie is great.
The GM creates a page with ABC where B is a gm-only section. A player opens the document, selects the end of A and the beginning of C then hits delete, then hits save. What happens to B? What if instead of deleting, the player adds something new in the middle, say paragraph D? So now he sees A'DC' and hits save. What should the GM see? Should it be A'BDC' or A'DBC'? Or should B be moved somewhere else altogether with some kind of "hey, I've been displaced!" flag on it?
There are a lot of approaches to tackle this, but none of them are trivial. We would probably have to track page content down to some sort of "chunk" level where as you're typing you're adding new chunks with different visibility metadata associated with it. To you it looks like "lorem ipsum" but to the system (and most importantly the database) it looks like lorem ipsum. Breaking down a document like that and rebuilding it for display is definitely a complex thing to do. And whenever we do something complex, there are bound to be bugs and weird edge cases. When those bugs are going into something as core as the wiki editing, that gives me a lot of hesitation.
That's not to say I won't take a stab at this, but I want to be clear that it's an incredibly hard problem, probably one of the hardest we've ever considered.
Just trying to help out.
I'd suggest replacing all text within a secret with 'Lorem Ipsum' (of the same number of characters and probably the same whitespace and everything) and just render it normally in the WYSIWYG interface; pictures, of course, would be replaced with generic images. This would make it so the editing player can see how the page should look to someone who has access to the secret without giving the secret away (except that one exists, which honestly isn't a big give-away as it could just mean the GM has some notes on the subject for himself).
Still, I can definitely see why that's a pie-in-the-sky idea. I'd like to see it implemented, but I'm not about to say you gotta to it or anything!
I would like to have a way to "tag/permission" forum posts for specific members of the group.
Our group uses Obsidian Portal forums for a lot of AFT (Away from Table) shenanigans. But when the party is split up, I would like to be able to help the players stay honest about what their characters know and don't know. At the same time, I would like to be able to make that forum viewable by the group once that portion of the adventure will no longer affect the play of the rest of the group, so they can share in the fun stories they create along the way.
Though the site is not very user friendly....and by not very....really isn't at all.
!http://i78.photobucket.com/albums/j111/weasel0/RPOL-GM-screen.gif!
~Weasel0
A Parade of Black | ShadowRunHack |
Where I play with CSS code
You could also allow for markup to flag sections of the text that would always be public so that you could have something that anyone could regardless of private flags. If you also restricted editing capabilities to only the GM and the players who had private status you would be able to keep the actual private information away from anyone who shouldn't see it.
-J
Just trying to help out.
For example, I have a few characters that my party will be meeting soon, as well as some that they have already met, and I wanted to link them through tags; however, the tags themselves could pose as a giveaway for information. Would it be possible to implement it such that the tags are on the revealed character and the GM-only character, but the tags that link them aren't seen on the revealed character (the same goes for other wiki pages)?
Also, I like the idea Viehmagnat tossed in. Individual permissions would be AWESOME as I have some players (and their characters) who are more knowledgeable about events occurring in game than others and would like to be able to reveal site/campaign information as they each find out about it.
~Mae
CotM Selection Committee
For now, I don't think we're going to mess with permissions too much. I think I'll have to revisit it at some point, but for now it's out of scope.
As you said, it may be out of scope for now, and I'm not really code-fluent so I have no idea how much actual work it would entail, but it's definitely something I have been thinking could make for a more immersive experience and keep "in-character vs. out-of-character" better on track.
Nonetheless, it's a concept for the farther-flung future, and right now there's enough on the plate without trying to add more.
~Mae
CotM Selection Committee