I'm talking about customizable parts of WoS, which would be great if they were changable.

Firstly, the text messages.

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In Merlin's Everspace world, it doesnt make much sense to have something like:

*Merlin's dead body trips a Star Cruiser*

I mean, how many Star Cruisers have you seen tripping over dead bodies?

It also doesnt make much sense in Everspace if you try to, say, fire a missile, and it flashes "You have been gagged" across the screen. It would be better if it said somehting like "Your missile bays have been disabled"

Or, in The Three Islands, where Paralyze is replaced by Freeze, it would be better if it said "You have been frozen stiff!"

So, it would be nice if you could chage/make your own messages for different worlds, to better fit the theme. It gives a better atmosphere if you are "sacrificed to the Great Kar'Tuul by Evil Minion #1".

Even better, if it could be dependant on the monster which kills you ("You have been swallowed whole by a Great Red Wyrm"/"You have been kicked in the shins to death by Evil Pixie"), or in a scene (You enter the Great Kar'Tuul's lair, and if you die in that scene, it displays the special message.)

It would also be nice to change the pet text. Instead of Merlin's spaceship fleets needing to be fed daily, and have frisbees thrown around, how about refueling and doing training excercises?

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Okay, there's the first batch of ideas about Customs. I'll be posting whenever I need somethin else :-D

It would be nice if you could put a "skins" folder inside the world directory, and that skin would only show up in the book of skins when you played that world. Better yet, it would show up in a Skin Catagory with the name of the world.

Again, I use Everspace as an example, since it's very unique (and thus a perfect example for changes). Merlin has 30+ skins made, but you have to manually download them and unzip them into the skins folder. It would be much easier if Merlin could just pop them all in a skins folder in the Everspace world folder to be downloaded with Everspace. And, to save us all the trouble of looking through our thousands of skins that we've accumulated, there would be a nice Everspace catagory on the side, with all the Everspace skins in it.

Now, this could be very easy for you if you made it a little harder for us. If you just made the skins folder the same type as the midi, art, monsters folders (where it will look there first, then to the main folder), then we, the World Dev's, could put the folder in it, and make a [worldname].ini file which tells WoS which skins are in that catagory. Simple, isnt it?

One thing about skin-containment however, often I hear suggestions from players and/or world designers who wish a skin could be limited in some fashion... for example:

* Only let boy characters have boy skins
* Only let sword-users have sword skins
* Only let Everspace users have Everspace skins

and, my favorite:

* This mod of bill's mod of this copyrighted DBZ character Jerry scanned from a magazine is MY PERSONAL PROPERTY and I will FRAG ANYONE WHO STEALS IT!

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While implementing a strutured/limiting approach to skin usage might be a way for me to invest another 20 hours or so of my life, it would, in the end, turn out to suck, since if people wanna use a skin, they will use it, even if that means copying and pasting in with a new name. And that just means even MORE redundant skin files being passed around consuming bandwidth.

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BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT YOU ASKED FOR... I just used you for that soap box..

I think having a world designer provide a set a skins and a matching set of .ini files for their categories would be cool, and work within the overall structure of the game.

To the degree that I could 'merge' a world folder with the more global skins folders... well, that would actually be a little difficult (because skin information isn't really read-only...)

But maybe some sort of 'import skin set' function which just ran unzip to the proper destination...

I dunno.

It would be nice to be able to edit the filenames for art strips. In Three Islands, I dont use boots, rings, or amulets, and thus it's a little weird to be drawing gemstones in boots.txt, and invisiblility cloaks in rings.txt, and giant pole-axes in music.txt!

I would like to be able to edit it so I could draw my gemstones in gems.txt, and my giant pole-axes in poles.txt.

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For Elements on the element wheel, you display the first three letters when selecting a spell ("Fir") and the first letter when applying PP to elements ("F").

I would like to be able to change what it displays, at least when you have the first 3 letters. To me, "Fre" would make a little more sense for shothand of fire than "Fir", or even better, "Pyr". Or, if you want to be consistent, you could change it to just " F " and have it match up with the PP elements.

I'd rather be casting an Earth spell than an Ear spell

-Jac

Instead of just being able to make edit the death messages, it would be nice to edit similar messages which may/may not be broadcasted to multiple users.

-Death Messages
-New Level Messages
-Learned Spell Messages
-Effects Messages (gagged/paralyzed/etc.)
-Cast Spell messages
-Incarnate/Left World messages

-Added vocabulary to the BLEEP list

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To help facilitate the creation of these (for the world dev, that is) you could have "cookies" in the messages, which have various meanings.

#mess.soulname - players soul name
#mess.soulnumber - players soul number
#mess.attacker - attacker in an attack
#mess.victim - victim in an attack
#mess.spelll - last spell learned/used

"mess." would signal that these are used only in messages.

So, you could have:

"Soul #mess.soulname (#mess.soulnumber) took form in The Three Islands."

"#mess.attacker beat the PP out of #mess.victim"

"#mess.soulname memorized the spell: #mess.spell!"

"#mess.soulname cast #mess.spell on #mess.victim"

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These would be set in a new section of the quest.txt file (thanks to sndrsn for this):

+TEXT
-TEXT

you could have the following syntax for declaring a message:

;#,message, type, method

1, "#mess.soulname incarnated!", 1, 3

First, you tell which number the message is, then the actual message, then the type of message it is (incarnated/PK/etc.), and lastly the broadcast method (player only/scene only/whole server).

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Anyway, those are my thoughts. I hope they'll help get this implemented :-D

Idea: +TEXT Table in quest.txt file
this would be really useful for me as a world developer and players would like it too as it makes every world more different.
here is an example for a space world:
+TEXT
MP="Weapon Energy"
HP="Shield Energy"
PP="Weapon data fillage"
Exp="Data Bank fillage"
Strength="Gun turret power"
Stamina="Shield power"
Wizdom="Additional Weapons power"
Agility="Warp power"
Dexterity="ZAP power"
Attack="Offensive Weapons"
Defence="Shields"
Huntskill="Radar Skill"

Trainhand="Update zap power"
Trainpet="Update/service non mother ship"
Call="Summon non mothership"

Newspell="New extra weapons"
Elements="Increease Access to extra weapons"

etc.

except some examples dont make a lot of sense. For example, the phrase
"HP" is only used on the stats page and on the little bar at the bottom, and Hunt skill is never used anywhere, except as a collection of dots in the buttonHunt.bmp picture. So it shouldnt be too long (no "Electromagnetic Reflector Shield Energy", but maybe just "Shields")

But yeah, that would be cool.

Pwetty pwease, samsyn?