Should we have Magazines to browse at bases?

[chuck_starchaser]

One thing I'd love to have ingame is magazines you can buy and read, say

Shipyard
Factional Landscape
Loose Ends
Repent!
Free Borders
Firekkan Skies
Hunter Killer
Gun and Turret
Comm&Oddities
Pleasure-Thing Me
Battlefront
Termination & Order
Explorer (the Unofficial Heroes' Journal)

..like, to replace the News. Using the same interface, possibly, just with more interesting news than "<random name> squadron giving chase in spite of taking damage"; or in addition to the news, separate interface. You could buy a magazine at the News screen, say, then click on it and it opens, and you'd have icons at the left and right bottom corners to flip the pages. There could be a total of 5 issues of each and once you've read them all you've read them all. Or, maybe the 5 issues appear at News screens periodically and throughout the game. So, if Blair caught a spy at the Concordia, you might find about it by reading Battlefront; or if some outspoken, retired Confed official wants to show political underwares, you could read his interview in Factional Landscape.

They'd have thoughtful articles... "Drayman Modding: You thought 3 was the limit?; read how this Drayman Modding Master managed to fit 7 medium turrets...".

And with ads, to give them a more commercial look.

And with classified ads at the back, so you might find good deals on just about anything, even collectors items: Say on Shipyard magazine... "Hellcat I prototype, mint condition"; but specially garage sale or auctioned type of stuff. Of course, you have to *need* the deals for them to make sense being there.... (read OT below)...

OT
If profits were a lot more marginal, it would extend gameplay and make it make more sense to try and shave costs...
/OT

[Fireskull]

Sounds cool, but should be low priority IMO.

[spiritplumber]

7 turrets in a drayman? (then again, the AWACS corvette is basically a giant ammo magazine for all the stormfire turrets, which is why it has good armor but crappy hull)

[chuck_starchaser]

Well, I'm thinking of another angle that might boost its priority...
HINTS
In the original Privateer, bar tenders are in charge of providing hints for the player. If we stick to that format for WCU, we're in trouble, because then we have to have people recording the voice-overs. Huge amount of work: recording, editing, cleaning up, compressing, and final checking that the text and the speech agree, and if anything needs to change, you have to do it again. I don't mind adding new bar speeches in moderation, but...
With magazines, we have a way of providing hints that is easy to produce and modify.
A careful player will read every issue of every magazine from cover to cover and miss no hint and no opportunity.
Say the ship we were talking about, from tiny paintings. We want to be able to buy it, but hard to find, so as to justify its only being spotted on very few occasions. But if you buy Shipyard magazine, you might find out from a glancing mention in some article, that that ship is of Firekkan manufacture, so you buy Firekkan Skies magazine, and you find out that there's only one Firekkan shipyard, and then you jump on your ship and go looking for this shipyard until you find it.
Same as with having news about Blair. If we're overlapping the time of some of his exploits, we NEED to have news; but who reads the news? With a periodical it's a different story.

[klauss]

That... somewhat... you can do it yourself, chuck.

Take a look at dynamic_new.py (I think it was that)
And, see if you can improove things. They badly need improvement, IMO.

Just have each news element have a "magazine ID" attached to it, and when content is ready, the news screen can be made to filter by ID. So, you select "Loose Ends" as filter, and only see the news attached to the "Loose Ends" magazine.

[chuck_starchaser]

I'm looking at it, but don't understand a thing. Not so much that I have never worked with Python, as much as that there's not much in the way of comments, like, ok, I suppose "def" defines functions, right?, so I see a function called 'makeNewsKeyList' and 'makeNewsList' and 'getBestMatch', this last one doing arithmetic!!! Very confusing, any pointers you could give me where to start?

[klauss]

Actually, I don't understand it myself... but I never got enough motivation to really poke. I did find that motivation with random_encounters.py, and got through with undestanding it, so I guess it's just a matter of time.

A python manual is very handy in this regard: try the python language documentation

Oh... and a list of available functions in the VS module is also handy. I usually browse the stuff in src/python for that, where are all the python exports. But I heared there's an official way of getting all the functions enumerated... but don't remember it (never used it)

[chuck_starchaser]

Okay, I'll try the old trick of reading through it 7 times..

[mat_yarrow]

The magazines, would they be in paper or in electronic format, or maybe both?

[spiritplumber]

I think it would be an evolution of the "news" interface... it can be done mostly in phyton. the last time i touched the news was to make them a little more flavorful as far as factions went.

mat: i got your bug reports, thanks!

[chuck_starchaser]

The magazines, would they be in paper or in electronic format, or maybe both?

I'd prefer paper format, myself, with a nicer font, like Garamond, pictures and all. But if that's too difficult to do I might get it started as per klauss' suggestion. (I don't mind writing the magazines themselves, but figuring out this python stuff.... yeach!)

[spiritplumber]

The only executable change we need is sub-tabs for news... then we can decide what is available at which base. Or do we want only one news slant to be available per base?

[klauss]

That's a neat idea.
The headline could be "Magazine/Issue", like "Repent/November_13", or something like that.
Then, the news screen can be made to group all those according to the magazine id: the thing behind the slash.
It wouldn't be much work, I guess, since the tree-like thing is already in there for upgrades, and IIRC, the same control is used for the news.

[dandandaman]

I'm looking at it, but don't understand a thing.

You should ask questions like this directly As it is, you're lucky I found this, as I don't often make a habbit of reading all the WCU posts

But now that I'm here, I can say that honestly, I don't see you needing dynamic_news.py at all...
The thing it was designed for was pulling out stories with undefined values in them (for flightgroups, systems etc) and making something human readable, customised to the base you're docked at.

As far as I understand, your stories are to be static? With what is available controlled by the python campaign? (Or through missions or somesuch?) In which case you just need to have the relevant text, and at the appropriate time in the campaign make and run a PushNews object (for the campaign) or the relevant function from news.py for normal python

So ya, unless you need the stories to be dynamically generated, then don't worry about dynamic news

Dan.a

( and sorry about the lack of comments ... I was sure I wrote more :-/ )

[chuck_starchaser]

Each magazine would have its slant; they wouldn't change between bases; but magazine availability might change with base. Repent!, for example, wouldn't be widely distributed. But you might find it, say, at Oxford, due to their efforts to remain objective an un-biased. Oxford (and university planets in general) would have all the mags.

[spiritplumber]

Gives an extra reason to visit uni planets

[chuck_starchaser]

As far as I understand, your stories are to be static? With what is available controlled by the python campaign? (Or through missions or somesuch?) In which case you just need to have the relevant text, and at the appropriate time in the campaign make and run a PushNews object (for the campaign) or the relevant function from news.py for normal python
So ya, unless you need the stories to be dynamically generated, then don't worry about dynamic news
Dan.a
( and sorry about the lack of comments ... I was sure I wrote more :-/ )

Thanks dan. The way I envision it is the mags would be pre-written from cover to cover. Single file. No dynamic nothing. And each magazine could have say 6 issues during the whole game. So you go to the news(stand) and see if there are any new issues of any mags you like.
The news will be relevant to events that are pre-scripted. So, if by the time the player does X, we have a big kat incursion into Border Worlds, then the issue of Free Borders with that piece of news becomes current after the player does X.
So, the idea would be, the way I see it, the News screen has an additional item whenever a new issue of a mag comes out, and if you click on it it opens and you can read from cover to cover if you like.

[dandandaman]

Ah, you are going to be doing a bit of filtering too then.
Well, the way you're setting it up, not much in dynamic_news will be useful. You're going to have to design your own structure to save and parse the 'relevance' to each faction with teh story.

In news.py, you can see that regular news stories are stored with their first character a hash (#), and dynamic news stories are everything else.

You will want to use a different identifying character, and then using some code (might as well add it to the NewsManager class as filterMagazine or something). For filtering code, you will want to take a gander at getPOV (which gets the relation between the defending faction in the story, and the attacking faction, and works out whether the base *likes* the events outcome or not) ... and isStoryRelevant (which puts a limit on how far from the originating system a story is heard ... not sure if you'd want to use this)

Dan.a

[chuck_starchaser]

You mean to filter which magazines are available? Or, were you thinking I want the regular news to appear in the magazines? I'm thinking of writing the magazines in one file, cover to cover, including the news, in advance. The *time of release* of each issue will depend on user actions. And only big news, related to the main plot, will be in them.

[dandandaman]

Which magazines were available

Dan.a

[chuck_starchaser]

I suspect you had the idea in your first post. Say the timeline of the main plot is supposed to last 6 months. So, we have, say, 10 magazines, and 6 issues for each. As the player does x, we consider that the end of the first month of the plot and release issue #1 for all the mags. As the player does y, we release issue #2. As the player does Z, we release issue #3.
The magazines include a few "news", but the news are written in advance, knowing that a particular issue of a mag won't be available before the player does something related to it. So all 6 issues of the 10 mags are fixed. The slant of the magazine is the same no matter at what base you buy it. But you wouldn't find Repent! or Loose Ends at Perry Naval Base. (Loose Ends would be a pirate mag; Repent! a Retro mag.)
So the base type only filters what mags are available.
The story timeline releases consecutive issues.
Regular news are still available at the News screen.
Only news in the mags are main plot related, and pre-written.

[dandandaman]

Yup, exactly

Dan.a

[chuck_starchaser]

Allright, dan, so I suppose this is your advice:

As far as I understand, your stories are to be static? With what is available controlled by the python campaign? (Or through missions or somesuch?) In which case you just need to have the relevant text, and at the appropriate time in the campaign make and run a PushNews object (for the campaign) or the relevant function from news.py for normal python

My next questions would be, then:
1) Can I make new magazine issues appear as links, instead of as text? That is, I'd like them to appear as just the name and issue number, colored in green if you haven't bought it yet, or as red if you already have it.
2) If it's green and you highlight it you get a buy button and a price, and if you Buy it the link becomes red and the mag "opens".
3) Would it be hard to have an interface for magazine browsing that divides the screen in the middle, with left and right pages, and buttons at the bottom corners for flipping the pages?
4) Mags that you already have, including old issues, you should be able to browse again. I guess we need some kind of small inventory for the player...
5) I suppose the mags you already have should appear on the right side of the screen in the Newsstand interface. So, maybe somewhere in the News screen there would be a mags section, and if you click on it it goes to a split screen like the upgrades or commodities screen, where you see the mags available for purchase and the ones you already have in inventory.
6) Is this getting too complicated?
7) What would be a good file format for mags? HTML? I suppose we should re-use existing code as much as possible. Does the fact that the engine has an XML parser imply it can parse HTML? I don't know much about these things...

EDIT:
I'm thinking of adding one mag to the list called Gray Zone or Underground. It would discuss political and social issues of life in the unofficial systems from a non-partisan, no faction slant perspective. This mag would only be available at university planets, in the official systems; and, browsing it, the player might get the first insights into the fact that there's more to the maps than meets the eye. It would NOT explain how to "get there", though. That comes later...

[Wisq]

Page flipping? I can see page scrolling on a PDA, but would they really be using paper publications in a space-faring future? They'd drown in the waste glossy paper alone.

[chuck_starchaser]

Sure they would. The myth of the paper-less office...
Well it wouldn't necessarely be *paper*, perhaps some re-writeable medium, but chances are it would resemble paper.
I've said this many times: This whole concept of technological advancement going up like an exponential curve forever is pure fantasy.
Most real inventions, like electrical utilities, internal combustion engines, the locomotive, the car, the telephone, radio and television, the rocket, the laser, splitting atoms... were all invented in the first half of the last century. Ever since then there's hardly been any major inventions at all; just refinements of those ones. And the promises we'd have all kinds of space stations at lagrange points, space tourism, bases on the moon, and people landing on Mars, never materialized.
And the process of refining technologies is coming to a ceiling as well: Moore's Law is dead: Intel's been trying to fit more transistors for a whole year now with no success. High-ultraviolet and X-ray etching plans seem to be in shambles. There hasn't been a single hertz of speed increase from Intel in a whole year.
Car companies have been producing ultra-futuristic concept cars every year and keeping Popular Mechanics mags selling as a result, since I was a kid, and yet cars are more or less the same today as they were back then, except that when they break, instead of a mechanic you need a systems analyst...