Quote:
Originally Posted by lumin
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Wow, getting these to work again is a great idea.
I really think that the "East Commonlands Tunnel" and "Guild Discussion" thread should be completely closed down and the Message Boards feature should be used in the game instead.
This is one thing that I think would make the taverns and inns actually be used for something. Wouldn't it be awesome to actually see players meeting up in the inns to form groups, sell loot, and recruit guilds? I think it would beat the heck out of posting it on lame forum threads.
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Amen. Taverns and Inns in EQ are kind of boring. I wish there were more things to do in them. It's "almost" fun to just sit (stand in place) and listen to non-players. Sometimes you can find quests that way (some quests work like this). There's so much that could be done to make them livelier and a better meeting place. Then again, it should all be an option, not a necessity.
The in-game message boards were nothing special. No edit command. Interface was probably slow. They don't have all the features that these forums do. So anything feature-rich would not be classic-compliant. If it was feature-rich and it was allowed to exist, it would threaten these forums and even /auction. Personally, I would rather see it stay simple and non-threatening the way it was. That way it doesn't change the game in big ways. Easier to implement too.
Has there been a poll about this? Have any of hte big names said anything? If this really happened in 1999, then I'm surprised that it's not operating. How hard is it to make a k.i.s.s message board system? Probably not
hard, and I program as a hobby. On the other hand, this would require a good bit of networking code and interface work. In my experience, that can be confusing, but that's probably because I don't like to touch networking code. For a new project coder, it would be way too much.
So you see.. on the server side we would have something like:
1) Store the posts in a series of file(s) like: qeynos.bbs, freeport.bbs, highpass.bbs.
2) When player clicks on BBS, the server loads the file and sends the information to the client.
3) When player clicks add button, server runs the bbs add_post command.
4) When player clicks update button, server sends a fresh copy of the bbs information back to the client.
.....
Etc. Something like that, but I'm missing a lot of stuff. Might want to break up the files into 10 posts each or something to reduce loading time and saving time and download length. You'd want to save with each change because if hte server crashes then you'd lose the bbs changes. The amount of traffic would probably be small since most people wouldn't be using it.
If you don't already have a system in place like this, it would take a while to get it working. Almost impossible for someone that's new because they don't even know the organization of the server/client code yet. I've worked with an open source client/server type project, and it was very very confusing. Can you say 200+ project files, couple different projects tied together, and cryptic code and wondering how it all comes together? It's not easy! At first, it's like reading chinese. Several months of constant browsing and tweaking to get anywhere. Depends on the project, and on what you spend your time doing. That's one of hte biggest hurdles for a project is to find a coder that can dedicate enough time to get things done.