Nova Ideas

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Emily
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Nova Ideas

Post by Emily » Sat Aug 15, 2015 3:21 am

Hey everyone. Most of you don't know who I am or what I do, but basically I love tweaking Nova. Whether it's the appearance or the functionality, I enjoy it for some odd reason. I know what I'd like to see in Nova, and I usually try and make it for myself. However, some people don't know how to do some of the things that the more experienced coder knows, as such I was curious if there was anything you, as a user of Nova, would like to see available for Nova as a mod or something similar.

Just let me know what it is you'd like to see or what you may not like about Nova 2 that might be able to be fixed. Keep in mind some of the changes that will be rolled out in NextGen, like a new way to create pages etc.

If enough ideas are given and actionable, I'll see if I can work on a mod or I'll forward it up to Anodyne and see what they think and if they can help. They've been helpful when I've needed help in the past, so I'm sure they'll help if we have some good ideas. :)

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Re: Nova Ideas

Post by Treymiar » Sat Aug 15, 2015 11:44 am

That's a wonderful niche to fill, especially for those of us who still live in the past century of html. In my case, past contentment must have become the mother of current ignorance.

The only Nova product enhancement I can think of this early in the morning is an engine to gracefully create and store both audio and visual elements for multimedia posts.

Here is the original suggestion: http://forums.pegasusfleet.net/viewtopi ... =26&t=2807
I should think that user-defined remote storage would be important. Otherwise, Nova servers could Quickly become crippled by busted storage limits and bandwidth. Maybe seamless links to photobucket or similar?
Yep, it's ambitious, but from an old DOS user, technology will advance by leaps & bounds. What seems impossible now will be a yawner in a few years.
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Alex
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Re: Nova Ideas

Post by Alex » Thu Sep 03, 2015 3:19 pm

I still like the idea of being able to count posts by word count, instead of just by authors or number of published posts. But I may be alone in that sentiment.
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Re: Nova Ideas

Post by Emily » Fri Sep 04, 2015 5:07 pm

I've sent your ideas to David, and this was his response :):
David / AgentPhoenix wrote:Storing audio and video for rich media posting...

This most definitely an interesting idea and would probably be the biggest shift in this form of gaming since it started. Unfortunately, it’s not very realistic at this point for several reasons. Leaving behind the idea of how games would use, the technical issues aren’t easy to overcome. Most games using Nova are doing so off of shared hosting which limit the amount of hard drive space they can use. Audio and video files take up a lot of space which would eliminate a lot of the games using Nova. Remote storage is an interesting idea, but it relies on the third-party services having APIs that can be tapped into (and often, they want unique accounts, not a large account). Not insurmountable, but it certainly creates a higher barrier to entry when I’m asking admins to do all sorts of stuff like that before they even get started. The other option would be for Anodyne to run a CDN where people could store their files, but the costs of running a CDN are huge and not something Anodyne could do given its revenue stream ($0 haha). I think at this juncture, it’s not a viable option, but I’ll certainly keep it in mind in the event that changes.

Word counting for reports...

Something like this shouldn’t be too tough, so I’ll look at doing this for Nova 3. Admins would then be able to build a report that shows all the users and their word count. I’ll also look at integrating a word counter into Nova 2 by default so admins don’t have to do that themselves.

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Alex
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Re: Nova Ideas

Post by Alex » Fri Sep 04, 2015 7:36 pm

If word count is something feasible, then maybe I'll elaborate a bit on some 'nice to haves'.

1)A word count per post that is viewable from the edit screen, letting us get a better idea of how long our posts should be.

2)A way to count the total number of words per month as part of the sim statistics. This could potentially lead to a new method of post counting. Instead of by the number of posts or the number of contributing authors that Nova allows now, we could do a total word count for the month. A sim's posting total for awards or such could then be scored by the number of 1000-word chunks, or something to that effect, which would probably still get normalized by the number of players on a sim. This would balance out sims that post a lot of short posts with sims that post a few long posts. It's a shame to see three 1000 word posts by two authors each count for more than two 1500 word posts by two authors each (6 posts to 4).

3)It was already mentioned, but if we're tracking posts by word count, then being able to track players within the sim by word count would be cool too, though more difficult. Since posts length is pretty fluid as it's being written, with tags and OOC comments getting added and deleted several times as it's saved, accurately counting the number of words per author would be pretty tough. Never mind, maybe we should scratch this one.

4)Separate signature field: On all of my sims we prefer to add signatures to the bottom of the post, which is especially important when we're writing as NPCs. It let's us know who should get credit for which characters. This field would get appended to the end of the post, but not included in the word count.

5)Separate OOC field for notes. This would not get published with the rest of the post, but perhaps could still be accessible to admins after being posted? It would also not be included in the word count, which would make it a bit easier to keep an eye on the length of the post. I've had a few posts look much longer than they ended up being simply because we had a long OOC note section. Once that was deleted prior to posting, it ended up a lot shorter than I had anticipated. It's not necessarily a bad thing that it was a bit shorter, but if you're using the scroll bar to gauge length, it could be misleading.

These were me brainstorming a few ideas off the top of my head, so I don't know how much use anyone but me would get out of them.
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Re: Nova Ideas

Post by Alex » Fri Sep 04, 2015 7:43 pm

I had one other idea. I've seen a few sims over the years that have used Nova for posting, but had a separate forum site for OOC discussions. There's also the Discovery, which has the forum somewhat integrated with the site on the surface, but it's not actually able to pull account information. This means that they are two separate entities with some code cobbled together to make the forum display on the Nova site.

While I don't want to get away from having the fleet forums, would it be possible to integrate some forum functionality within the sim sites for OOC discussions and mission planning? Right now my sims mostly do that with OOC saved posts that don't get published, but having a forum might help build the community on each sim. This one might be a bit more difficult to do, but since I was brainstorming, I figured that I would toss the idea out there.

An alternate idea that I have considered is to have a subforum for each sim, and players would have to be added to that group before they could access it. The only problem with that is that not everyone in Pegasus Fleet is on this forum (even though they totally should join), whereas with an integrated forum they would be automatically added since it's all part of the same Nova login.
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Re: Nova Ideas

Post by Williams » Sat Sep 05, 2015 4:54 am

Alex wrote:4)Separate signature field: On all of my sims we prefer to add signatures to the bottom of the post, which is especially important when we're writing as NPCs. It let's us know who should get credit for which characters. This field would get appended to the end of the post, but not included in the word count.
An extension on this idea could be that each user can have a pre-set 'signature' text, similar to how you get with forums, that would then automatically get added to the signature text area of the post when they make a contribution to that post. The overall signature text should still be editable before the post goes out to mention things like NPCs used or to change the text if someone is portraying someone else, or in a temporary position different to their norm or something... but that sort of pre-populating feature would be quite handy in that it could let COs set their own formats for the signatures. I know that before I've used simple image-based signatures for each person to add to the end of posts, but since not everyone could be bothered with that, to keep it all looking consistent I had to keep going in and editing posts I wasn't in to add those in, so I stopped using them.

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Emily
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Re: Nova Ideas

Post by Emily » Fri Oct 02, 2015 2:07 am

So, I've touched base with David (AgentPhoenix) from Anodyne and showed him your replies. He told me to let you guys know that he's planning on adding a signature feature in a Nova 2.5. He's also looking at a flagged words feature that would "highlight any words in the compose box of a log, news item or post if it’s in an admin-controlled list of words that are known to cause issues with a server (like casino or poker or things like that)" also for 2.5. Sadly, there is no timeframe for the release of 2.5 at this point.

If you have any other ideas, by all means, keep 'em coming! :D

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Re: Nova Ideas

Post by Treymiar » Sun Oct 04, 2015 2:07 am

Another Idea. If people want to call this 'Big Brother', then I'll raise my hand and admit to it.

Sport Athletes have performance stats, right? RBI, Homers, Walks, Doubles, Strikeouts, etc. Why not players?

The enhancement? Implemented on an IFS level, player statistics would accumulate:

Posting Level averaged for membership in multiple simms.
If a Simm Post Rating is, for example, 4.0 per month, players who have a 1.01 rating probably need to think twice before applying.

Q: What about new players?
A: This is a self diagnostic, not a legalistic statistics whip. It won't be much use for new players. It will be a wakeup call for veterans.

Q: What about different simms, different logins?
A: IFS can link users in different simms just like npc's can be linked to a single (fleet) PC.

This would be an exceptional tool for mission planning. Missions stall out because key players don't answer tags in a timely manner. Missions could now be planned around the slow 1.01 rate players. They can certainly participate, but the core mission could be designed to not depend upon them.

Players, you want more central roles in missions? Earn it.
(Give new players benefit of the doubt.)

Might players flood junk posts just to run up their stats? Only if the CO allows it. Maybe the CO/XO have the right to "De-Validate" that this post should count toward fleet statistics or not. Players could appeal to Jag if they feel like good posts are being de-validated.

De-Validation should doable only for a limited window of time. A month later? Let the good posts stand. This is to protect players from future retaliatons.

I would recommend that posts Validate by default.
Also, the post should have a little dot/seal/symbol to indicate its status, in the event that there is a question.

- PSF
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Re: Nova Ideas

Post by Treymiar » Sun Oct 04, 2015 9:10 am

Addendum - Forgive me if this is patently obvious, but this Nova enhancement would require cooperating modules be added to both Nova and IFS software.

I think that fleet simm ratings would encourage players to participate at PF central.
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"Sometimes, people become enemies because they don't understand each other.
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