Silgrad Tower from the Ashes

I've thrown together a rudimentary demo of how an interactive claim system might work, based on the discussions I had with Elathia during the late summer of 2005, and would like to get your opinion on the structure and options.

http://www.silgrad.com/oblivion/scs/

The demo isn't functional, and clicking the buttons or trying to fill out forms won't work. I haven't spent much effort in making it look nice, the important thing is to first decide what functions and structure we want and then try to make it look decent. Some of the imagined functions haven't been put in the demo, such as the ability for a user to upload a plugin. I've put some personal scribbling on the front page as a reminder to myself.

At the start of the demo it's assumed you aren't logged in. As a visitor you can still read the open claims (by clicking Ashranashurbi in the Name column), but you can't claim anything.

If you click the "LOG IN" link you can choose to log in either as a normal modder or as a moderator. As a user, if you click the Ashranashurbi link again, you'll get some more data compared to a visitor, namely, how many new claims you can take on and the ability to claim this one.

As a moderator, you'll see that Ashranashurbi has been submitted; by clicking that link you can download the submitted plugin, check it out, and either approve or reject it together with supplying your comments. You can also register a claim from the front page.

In the main list I'm imagining that a modder can follow the progress of his claim.
? After he's staked the claim it's shifted to the closed list;
? after he's submitted the plugin, it shows up under "Mod reviewed" to indicate it's in the appropriate moderator's inbox and pending review;
? If there's dialogue in the plugin, the moderator can choose to move it to the Editor's table in the final stage, where it's spellchecked and perhaps corrected grammatically
? After a claim's plugin has been merged to a main .esp, it's moved to the "Archive" tab. The final move automatically makes the claimer aware that his work has been appended.

I'm sure I've missed something so please, fire away your comments, thoughts, suggestions, opinions etc

A very nice and streamlined way to do things RW! :goodjob:

I'm not sure some of those should be included to claim, such as entire towns, dialogue, and voicework. Those should be left to the core.

• The towns are basically decided on anyways, correct?
  
• Dialogue that is included to make a quest should be done by the quest maker, so it shouldn't be a seperate claim.
  
• Voicework is hopefully going to be my area, and I have a few other ideas that are slowly baking inside my crazy mind. Having a claiming system for it wasn't really what I had in mind.
  

We may want to test this way should we decide to use this, just to see if it's really better than the forums like we've done in the past. I'm a little afraid of change, but this seems nice, so I'll welcome it.

Posted 14.01.2006 07:15
noremorse: Thanks.

Now that you mention it, I think that the claiming of towns and villages should need to be manually approved before they're granted by the person in overall charge of respective area.

Dialogue isn't always tied to a quest though. You're right that the preferred way is if dialogue is added by the modder at the same time as the interior and NPC is modded, but that isn't always a viable option. Can't shut modders out just because they suck at english I think, and the ability to separate it is slightly better than getting crappy dialogue that has to be replaced anyhow.

I'll nix the voice work claims.

Posted 18.01.2006 06:17
Updated it:

http://www.silgrad.com/oblivion/scs/

Cool. Do you think that we could streamline it into the website itself?

Quote:Originally posted by noremorse
Cool. Do you think that we could streamline it into the website itself?

Maybe I can mimic the website's design at a later stage, yes.

Well... it's looking less and less likely that Elathia is ever going to do anything with the claims system. Pity.

I wonder if there's a free php software that would let us pull off something like this. Anyone know? If not I guess we'll have to fall back on the forum to handle claims.

This doesn?t really concern me, but ill comment anyways.

This is a lot like the system the TR has in place (the claims browser but without the corresponding forums and much simpler) and judging by description it work similarly. Witch is cool, since the claims browser has saved TR a butt load of time and headaches :yes:
hopefully this thing will do the same for you.

is it possible the Tes4 Vvardenfell mod-team can use this?
cause right now we are using the old-fashioned edit-a-big-post-with-list-of-claims style
if my group could switch to a more streamline and easier self-managing style, that would be much better, save a lot of work and let people do what they want rather than spend an hour organizing names and claims, etc. :yes:

so how would I set something like this up?

Lady Nerevar:
I'm not familiar with TR's system but I'm not surprised there are some superficial similarities between them.

KuKulzA:
Well, right now the system is just a static html mockup to serve as a demo. It would have to be 'animated' to be of any use to anyone, and from a practical standpoint Elathia was the only one who could pull that off.

This picture is sized 50%, and is only map 3 (wich doesn't have NPCs, quests, and the like) notice the scroll bar



that is of course the view of a global moderator.