Ahoy there!
I talked with Crickette who is going to help us get a Character Sheet/XML Feed board going on these forums. To clarify, this is not for debating the invasiveness of such a service (actually, maybe it will be? I'm not sure will have to see what Crickette lays down), but rather for discussing all ideas related to the viewers themselves. I.e. how to set one up, examples in various languages, ideas for future improvements, collaboration, etc. To that end, those of us who have authored them need to think of initial stickies for the board. Here's my thoughts:

Basic Tutorial: What the service is. How to get an XML feed from it. Ideas of different ways someone might show it (very broad).

Examples: Small easy examples in various languages. So far we should be able to get PHP, XSLT, ASP, and Javascript. While these won't fit nicely on the board, we all have hosting so just make a little zip file with the example and toss it on your server.

Known Viewers: Gotta have a list of all known viewers out there. We all have different layouts and features, so the players should be able to find the one that's just right for them.

Libraries: Eventually I'll have a php library out for this, once I clean my code a bunch and figure out what's needed to show a character, and what I've added in for simplicity. I'm guessing others may put them out as well. This may not be created from the start, but it'd be nice to have.

Specs: We need to show the XML spec(s) of the feed(s) as soon as we can so others can parse them even without our libraries. Not saying people can't figure it out, just saying that this would save a lot of time!

Alright, what can ya'll add on? What would someone who's never written a viewer need to know to write one?



Edited by Snarky (02/04/08 07:00 PM)

Just a suggestion. Im assuming you are storing player names & number of views in some file or database. Is there anyway to only oneup their views when a new/unique ip address views their name? As you have it right now, simply refreshing the page counts as a "view". So, epeen players are racking up their own views.
Maybe make another file or database that if ip address matches previous ip address for that name it doesnt add to their views.

I've discussed this with a few players. Yes, I (and any author) can change their logging, get creative, whatever. But that creativity comes at the expense of other creativity, and I've got a nice list of stuff i want to add. I will not fix this to stop kids from bragging about their number of views at the expense of stuff I actually want to do, sorry.

But to make this applicable to this thread: What ways can we minimize players griefing others with our tool, while maximizing the applicability of the tool?

I've been working on a viewer using xslt (xml stylesheets). If anyone else is interested in this I would be more than happy to share.

I'm interested in knowing what people want from a viewer. I am basically trying to reproduce the in-game character sheet, but I am sure there are better ideas out there.