New LOTJ App – Ideas needed!

Hey all!

Preface:

I’m not very active on the forums, so if any of you do not know me, I’m Veska! I’ve been playing LOTJ since about ’04.

I’ve been wanting to build something for LOTJ for a while. I had originally set out to build a whole new MUD server in Node.js and javascript. My initial prototype actually went really well, but I eventually ported it over to another project. I found the scope and time required to build a Mud server just was not fitting into my schedule – but a small app is definitely something I can do.

I’ve been rolling over a few ideas, but mostly have been focusing on what kind of technology I’m going to use as I will be using this as a learning experience for myself.

Technology Stack:

Server: Node.JS
Database: MongoDB
Transport: Socket.IO (web sockets)
Other: Various other node modules (tbd)
Source Control: github
Client: Any HTML5- W3C compliant browser
Hosting: I have not selected a host yet, but I will be be flipping the bill

App Guidelines:
This app will be open source (license tbd), and if the admins of LOTJ would prefer to take ownership over the code, I will gladly hand it over to them. The app will be free, will not break any LOTJ rules, or release any information that would give any kind of unfair advantage if someone did not use it. This app will not interact with LOTJ in any way.

Okay so.. What am I going to build?  Well I want to see if you guys had any ideas on App that would help improve the LOTJ experience!

So.. What do you guys think? If LOTJ could have a new app in the next few months, what would it be?

Idea from OOC:

I talked about this on OCC a little but and a few people brought up the idea of a character-builder that had some powerful filtering tools for level-selection. Something like this would include tons of RP information for, multiple pictures, and of course.. level/class information. The user could, perhaps, filter for RP characteristics, level requirements, etc.

Help Wanted:

If you are interested in seeing a cutting-edge HTML5 app built from the ground up, you will now have that opportunity. I  will also welcome collaboration, and encourage people to branch my code and mess around with it. I could definitely use an artist, designer, or someone who has a love for CSS3 and front-end work. All levels of experience are welcomed 🙂

Thanks!
Veska

I remember the conversation on OOC about character creation apps. Do we really need to encourage minmaxing? If Kraine thinks that most people only roll characters for RP reasons, he’s either naive or stupid. Then again, people are going to attempt to twink regardless and the FOTM races are going to keep coming along. I just don’t see any reason to encourage it.

Now if your character app included information already available through showrace, and helped to negate having to pour through doing showrace 40 times, along with a little fancy link to the races’ associated Wookieepedia pages, I’d be all for that.

I’m excited to see what you end up doin Veska! Thanks for giving back to the community!

I personally think that, done correctly, a web-based character builder could help lower the barrier to entry for new players while not providing an unnecessarily easy way to twink your levels. Sorry to hear your full MUD server project got dropped, I was pretty pumped to see how it turned out…

But either way, I think a character builder would be neat, or some sort of assisted newbie tutorial where you are connected to and playing the real mud, but with tips popping up in your “web client” of sorts – similar to like codecademy.com but for learning to MUD instead.

🙁  it’s not fully cancelled – just put on the back burners until I have more time to plan it out more carefully. I realized I had gone down a rabbit hole that needs to be reversed – I built the engine to be an RTS server not a mud server.

Well, I actually was planning on making this more of a character planner, similar to that found with MMOs – but a guided character creation mode would be better – especially if we tied it into the mud character creation process. XD

We could definitely do something similar to codeacdemy.com, but we’d have to build an API with the mud server to send event messages to the web client. OR… the events could be pushed to the node server, and then sent to the client with xhr or a websocket. (the servers can be on the same box – Node is extremely lightweight)

I’m almost done building out the database, and the file server. A little bit more work with the websockets, and then I’ll be ready to start on the front end. V1.0 will have a pretty ugly interface. Once I get the data-manipulation down right, I’ll make it pretty and snappy.

In terms of features, right now my original plan is to get a ‘database’ of all the races, with tons of RP information and pictures. Essentially a landing page for every race – navigating the races will hopefully be streamlined and fast.

My first goal is solve the problem of: helprace *racename*, showrace *racename* spam that I do when I try to pick a new character.

After that, I’ll start on the character planner part, as that will require a bit more thought.

GitHub: https://github.com/doc82/lotjCharacterBuilder

Got the heart of the server and client built.. (ignore the bad layout)

https://github.com/doc82/lotjCharacterBuilder