Hello, folks!
A couple weeks ago, while brainstorming with TreChriron about an online character generator and manager that would be aviable online, and so would was born the Project Muse
As ideas flew, it was growing more and more ambitious.
in a nutshell it would consist as such
-Dynamic character creation, menu and icon based rather than filling spread sheets cell by cell. the mecanics would be hidden as would the calculus. the user says what scores he wants in this or that skill and the application would calculate the amount of CP/Rez being spent. by printing, a PDF would be generated with a "traditionnal" character sheet look (could be custom sheet)
-Character management: choice of current morph and automatic adjustment to the sheet, spending Rez point, management of reputation, networking and contacts, purchase, conception and sale of gear (see point(
below)
-A market of sort for gear, by using either credits or rep levels. Something akin to IMVU's virtual store, Second Life Market Place, Amazon, etc, but with fictive money and updating the character sheet/file with he new gear.
-Morph database and creation mecanism for instant sheet adjustment when resleeving
-collecting characters in an online vault either for private use or pregen characters for fellow players/GM to download and use.
More ambitious ideas soon joined them:
-Interactive Rep system between characters, allowing virtual tables and much, creating an IC network of players through characters.
-characters uploading their creations (morphs, blueprint, weapons, etc) on the market, with a rating system, awarding them rep (R-rep for morph, C-Rep for pregen, G-rep for Weapons, etc)
-3D modeling of one character's avatar, again like IMVU or Second Live. These would change depending on what morph the character is sleeved in. Taking snapshot and saving said image for either the sheet or forum avatars
-Setting manager: streetmap of habitats, canon and original, with point of interest and character location (handy for mush and virtual table like Maptool)
-interactive dice roller with MoS/MoF calculus and
Another suggestion was made, but the more I look at it, the less it looks feasable: IOS(ipod/ipad) and/or Android application to link with the vaults and manage one's charact on the fly. That would be awesome but potentially costly
-VPN-ish party management for GM and his/her party, to share character sheet, rep and rez management. So when a player has an idea for rez-spending between two game, he or she would submit change on his or her sheet and the GM, through the VPN would be notify and could endorse the change or deny it. GM could also contact one player-character directly or character to character messengering like they'd do on the Mesh (or RLy, on soft like Rolistik, Inferno or Maptool)
I have ideas, plenty of them, but I totally lack the skills (in programming, and graphics stuff) to do it myself or alone.
So I'm looking for a programmer (or more), graphist (for user interface and Flash) and possibly sysop for the vault, market and repnet part. I know that the Admin of EP France would be interested at least in the vault part.
Down bellow you'll find some idea I've had for the interface, aiming for a Mesh-like look. these are very crude, made with Windows Paint, but it should give you an idea of what I was thinking. I don't know exactly what the general interface would look like, so far I've got the aptitude/skills part down.
Think this could be very handy and quite an innovative way to manage characters and setting for RL tables, virtual tables or mushes
if supported by Transhumans Studios, this could lead also to something like Pathfinder Society or Shadowrun's missions.
What do you all think?
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While this sounds like a really cool idea - I think it might benefit you greatly to break it down into stages. That way it'll be easier to design each step along the way and get the popular interest you're looking for.
Start simple and iterate in stages.
For what it's worth - some of the things on your list (esp the 3d rendering of avatars) I would estimate if you were to try to get someone to do it for money would start to run you well into 6 figures. Looking at it from a programmers point of view, I wouldn't touch a project this large for anything less than that myself - and I would insist on having at least four other people backing me up. This is *really* ambitious - and while ambitious doesn't mean impossible on a volunteer basis (see Drupal, Apache, Open Office, GIMP) - you really need to play the iterative game. Break it up into parts.
I know at least one other person out there has been kicking around the idea of doing a drupal 7 site to do character generation. I'm not sure how far along he is on that project though.
I know there's the Muse site that may also be related to your efforts http://epmuse.farvista.net/
Lastly, there's a lot of non-technical overhead when it comes to making a Society play system, so if making a player society is your goal here and not just a generic character generator/storage location then I think you want to turn your focus away from the technical support on that end and get the social support sorted out first. Figure out what you want to do before you get settled on how to do it or what the buttons should look like.
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