"Trading Card" Descriptions.

[Xoel]

Hey everyone,

Just thought I'd post my basic idea for trading card descriptions here. If implemented well, this idea could create quite a cool way of viewing each others basic description, basic stats, and perhaps equipped-weapon-skills.

My idea is simply to change the layout and appearance of the description window to look like a typical tabletop RPG or trading card game card. The character's full name is displayed there, a short description as written by the player, and across one side, important stats. All this is displayed with a cool image and trading card background. I am going to ask Talad how easily this could be done, the image could be rendered as a 3D view of the character in a podium like environment (like the inventory window, but with an action pose in a field, battle, temple steps... hopefully can be chosen by the player). This is static to look like the (still) image you see on trading cards. The background itself will change based on the player's "race".

Anyway, give some feedback!

[Kleon]

Sounds good to me! Just so long as it works better than those few months in PS when we had to introduce ourselves to everyone.

[Xoel]

It won't have any effect on the names appearing above heads just the description window.

[Xoel]

This gives a basic idea.

[burley]

In the Open Source release of PS, much of the data needed for your trading card is already available. That is, the stats of the encountered character/NPC is already being displayed. This has been made apparent, to me, by just looking at the description area of an encountered NPC; as opposed to any code crawling at this point,

Below is a screen shot of a loaded character looking at an NPC called MoveUnderground with the Stats tab highlighted. How you would place the stats data on the trading card (once retrieved from the program) is more in your realm than mine; yet it should be available to you to do so in that area.

Can values from variables in a program be easily incorporated into a graphic image on the fly?

- Burley

P.S. All the other values you would expect in the other tabs are available as well. Screen shots can be made available if you want; yet a visit to the server should make that readily available to you. The details of logging on have been sent to you via pm.

[Xoel]

weltall mentioned that a "doll" would need to be coded for the window. I assume he means the part about making the 3D render window image.

My intentions for that:

The player, when editing their description, can choose from a set of scenes. Each scene has a different pose. When looking at the card, whoever is looking will see the character standing in that pose.

If this is too tricky to do easily, I can look into doing several renders in Blender, seperating them into different parts with alpha'd out backgrounds, allowing us to have different 2D elements to compose into the "picture".

[burley]

Not sure what weltall meant by a doll. Perhaps he is referring to a widget? The widgets in question are called from pawsdetailwindow.cpp and pawsdetailwindow.h of the cleint source.

The actual graphics looks like it may be in:

$HOME/development/planeshift/art/pawseditor.zip

pawseditor.zip contains the following files:

[booner@booner gui]$ unzip -l ../../../art/pawseditor.zip
Archive: ../../../art/pawseditor.zip
Length Date Time Name
--------- ---------- ----- ----
2888 05-21-2006 22:46 buttondown.dds
2888 05-21-2006 22:46 buttonup.dds
1520 05-21-2006 22:46 down.dds
3360 05-21-2006 22:46 imagelist.xml
1520 05-21-2006 22:46 left.dds
824 05-21-2006 22:46 listselect.dds
1520 05-21-2006 22:46 normal.dds
824 05-21-2006 22:46 radiooff.dds
824 05-21-2006 22:46 radioon.dds
1520 05-21-2006 22:46 right.dds
1520 05-21-2006 22:46 scrollthumb.dds
1520 05-21-2006 22:46 scrollthumbmove.dds
824 05-21-2006 22:46 shaded.dds
67 06-23-2005 11:59 skin.xml
848 05-21-2006 22:46 spindown.dds
848 05-21-2006 22:46 spinup.dds
11152 05-21-2006 22:46 titlebar.dds
848 05-21-2006 22:46 treecollapse.dds
848 05-21-2006 22:46 treeexpand.dds
1520 05-21-2006 22:46 up.dds
87536 05-21-2006 22:46 back.dds
43856 05-21-2006 22:46 backmedium.dds
22032 05-21-2006 22:46 backshort.dds
174928 05-21-2006 22:46 backtall.dds
824 05-21-2006 22:46 busy.dds
--------- -------
366859 25 files

The following thread, on the PS forum, may be helpful to you:

www.hydlaaplaza.com/smf/index.php?topic=17930.0

It is suggested, in that thread, that you can create unique Resource for your background images in the imagelist.xml file. imagelist.xml is included in the above zip file.

Let me know if you would like a copy of pawseditor.zip made available to you.

- Burley

P.S. I had a look through imagelist.xml and there are a lot of png files used to construct the window. Perhaps we could take an image of your card (if in png format) and replace some files like art/eedit/back.png to see, by trial and error, which one will have to be used to install the Trading Card.

[Xoel]

Most of those button images are floating around the PSClient release art (I've spent a fair amount of time examining the release files).

From what I know about PAWS, we shouldn't have any issues making the card background appear, I'm more concerned with making the trading card show the image in the top right corner as indicative of race, or perhaps having various card bases, one for each polis/"race".

By "Doll" I think weltall meant the 3D part I had mentioned, (which isn't in my preview I drew up, replaced with a 2D image there) where I intend to display the character itself (with equipped equipment) in a choosable pose and a choosable background. If need be this can be replaced with assorted 2D imagery. I think a static 3D render similar to the inventory window's character dispay would be cooler.