You can now move Items from Slot to Slot in Rooms. Next up, making those items usable. Dhoom Machale.

Or I might tinker with the latest part of the Watcher story...

Working on the Slots system, which will let us be a lot more flexible with adding different sorts of things to Furniture slots in the future.

Salaam e Ishq, Ishq, Ishq, Salaam e Ishq.

Oh hey, would you look at that - the beds are a separate module, now.

Listening to this. Not a Bollywood song this time, honest. I can now sleep in a bed! I have to rewrite the New Day Menu module a bit, which is honestly probably gonna be a complete bitch, but I'm getting closer every day.

No more ghosts!

So, an ETA? Well, it's gonna take, I'd say, three weeks at least until the core Places stuff is ready - that is to say, until we can replace the entire current Dwellings system with Places. Pages programming... well, that's gonna take a while.

There will be a test server for the core system, so we can fix any bugs before the system goes live.

Also, this is a beautiful song. It's trance, mind, so you might just wanna skip the first minute and a half. Or, there's always the acoustic version.

A bit of elaboration on how the new Slots work:

A Slot contains an Item. That Item has a pref that says "Hey mister Slot, when the player clicks on me, just go to this page. Dead easy." So we can put pretty much what we want into Slots, with the idea that any furniture item will be a separate module and Item, as simple or as complicated as we like, without the need to make any changes to Places to create new furniture items.

(Players won't be able to sleep on the floor any more. Sorry.)

(actually no I'm not)

Wait, really? So empty sleep spots will kind of just sit there and mock you? Well, I guess it is motivation to buy all sorts of awesome custom furniture for a dwelling (or should I say a Place, now?).

Man I am so excited for this whole thing. I can't wait to see what people do with the ability to do Goddamn Anything.

"I'm sorry, Ms Watcher, m'am, I can't go kill monsters right now, I'm busy designing and building my new house."

THUMP

.......

Coming soon on Network television! Home Improvement, starring everybody's favorite DIY'er, Grim Talon!

---

Thank you.

Okay, I rewrote all our current Beds to work in the new system, and fiddled with the Chronospheres module so that it once again works properly.

Keys system, now...

EDIT: Ah yes, I remember now why I was putting this off. I was putting this off because it's boring as hell.

There are only 22 DeadBolt keys on the entire Island. I think I can quite safely leave those out...

Keys.

D:

Keys.

They're so boring, you guys. So, so very boring to work on.

Whoop! Whoop!

Well done for grinding on through!

---

It's not an optical illusion. It just looks like one.

Yeah, I never quite understood the purpose of those. To me it just seems like they're only useful if you gave a "room key" to one person, somehow regretted it later, and decided to deadbolt the room instead so you can give a deadbolt key to a new person and the first person doesn't have access anymore... (lover's quarrel, perhaps) About the only other application I could think of would be having a clan hall were all the members have keys, but maybe when you hold Officer meetings you deadbolt the hall and only the officers have deadbolt keys? But if that's the case, you can just make a new room ("Officer's Lounge" for example) and use a regular key for that...unless you want people to see the meeting after the fact...

I don't know, maybe someone's got a better example than me, but with only 22 deadbolt keys on the entire island, I think it would be safe to say it's not a very popular feature.

---

Something something unintelligible gibberish something.

I'd gone through similar thought processes to Trowa, I can't really think of any use for them. Even his idea of having an officers meeting. and then letting everyone see it would be easier to do by having a seperate room and then just leaving it unlocked.

I can't help suspecting that a goodly portion of those 22 that have been used were used because they were there and people wanted to play with all the toys that there are.

I certainly wouldn't miss them.

From what I understood there is a choice.
And last time you were given a text dump of your dwelling so you didn't have to copy and paste.

The only thing we know so far is that there will be a debug() statement to let you see your current Dwelling's structure.

Until the new system is finished, we won't know how we're going to do the transition.

This new dwelling system looks FANTASTIC. It's a shame I hardly ever get to play anymore.

Two (or three, sort of) suggestions/questions. Not being a coder myself, I have no idea if these are even feasible.

-Could dwellings be made to give out Mementos? I recently rewrote Syd's map shack (since that was shite anyway) into a Machine of Death testing center, and I'd LOVE to be able to let people walk away with an actual prediction card. (For those unfamiliar with the Machine of Death, it's the concept of CMJ's WCG rival, Ryan North. Check it out here) This also has the potential to make stores available, with a sort of "currency," in essence trading mementos with the dwelling.

-Could certain pages be made to output random choices from a list of options? This was my other potential solution to the MoD center. A list of options to put in a part of, or the whole, page?

-The third, kind of a mash up between the two, would be giving out one random memento from a "bank" of possible mementos.

Just thoughts... feel free to shoot them down at any time.

~Syd

Based on CMJ's first post, it looks like we'll get the ability for structures to dispense mementos based on a certain conditions (i.e. player enters room, player entered a command, player walked in at x time, etc.), but it doesn't look like we'll have the ability for players to give back or trade mementos with a structure, or have the ability to use randomization for anything....yet. Would be nifty, though... "Player finds Square Peg in the Foyer... Player uses Square Peg in Basement to open Secret Door... Player finds Magic Kumquat in Secret Room!"

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Something something unintelligible gibberish something.

Ah. How silly of me. Upon rereading the first post, I do indeed see that. Well, my other two ideas still stand, I think. Random text and random mementos.

It looks like since the memento-dispensing function is lined up, the random stuff shouldn't be too hard to implement... I think...

Oh yeah, I just realized that if it isn't already in mind, a "remove memento X" function to match the "dispense memento X" could be very useful, though I don't know if there's a way to prevent misuse... like maybe a permission from the memento's creator? Idunno.

I'll throw this out there - I'd be willing to give making a converter a go. The main thing that this would need is a solid layout of what the database structure is for the new system - Once it's done, obviously. But I've done database output to various formats and converting data from one table to another for work, and I've got some experience converting a semi-complex PHP object into a collection of database entries from my work on the Shift Engine.

If this meant creating something to output a computer-readable backup of the data so that the tables can be wiped and replaced with the new ones, that would work too, since I could focus on doing the output now, and have that somewhat ready when the new system rolls in to simply make the other half.

---

Goat Collector

However the conversion is managed, it can't be by wiping the old tables.

Or, well, if it is, I can tell you right now, the trains will stop running until I can rewrite them. It'll be a rush job, and nobody will like it, me least of all. The train stations are Dwellings, you see. If they are force-converted to Places before Trains 2.0 has been written, the current rail modules will not work.

I can't even begin coding until I know the framework the new trains will have to work in.

Therefore, there's a simple choice. Either we run both systems in parallel for a while, with the option to switch dwellings one at a time from old to new. Or...

No trains, for maybe quite a long time.