Hubworld: Ideas to help Graal
 

My ideas are getting buried in the Lifetime Classic thread, so I'll start a few new ones.

Hubworld
Purpose: make a single common-server where players can congregate, foster a sense of community lacking since the advent of the server list.
Options: Replace the server list altogether, place at the top of the serverlist/as default server
Expansion: Perfect place to host/organize the Global Quest
Requires: Stefan to give us Global Strings, a stable System NPC donated from an existing server, the cooperation of participating servers' admins.

Basically, instead of just going to a world via the ServerList, you warp back to the Graal Hubworld - maybe it's a space station, maybe it's a mystical village deep in a forest, maybe it's a town, maybe it's all inside a pub, these things are debatable. The key feature is a series of warp gates - ideally, a different one for each server. Classic's warpgate would be the standard water-swirl, probably with some clever tiling forming a dais for the warp platform; Kingdoms would probably have a nice particle-effect magic wormhole; Zone might have a teleporter pad, "Like Star Trek!"; etcetera. Whenever you enter the Hubworld from another server, you come out of that warpgate - and still look like you did on the server you just came from. It's easy enough to pull off this effect (I did it on Graalympus), you just have to borrow the other servers' replaceani commands and select based on that...but you need global strings to get the players' appearance on said server, so.
That's the basics of it. The Graal Hubworld would expand eventually to include meeting rooms (the ultimate Guild Hall), Game rooms (a great place to anchor the Flash Games), and ideally a translation book so people from other countries can communicate via pre-determined pictographs ("Hello" becomes :) , "have a seat" becomes an arrow pointing to a chair, "Check" becomes a colored king with panic lines, "Checkmate" becomes the king falling over...). Someday it could be the center of a Global Quest, each server reading your progress on other servers and giving you a little bonus for it (kinda like having a Metal Gear Solid 2 save on your card when you play one of the thousands of sequels)...expanding to some quests which span multiple cooperative servers, running onto one server to foil an escaped madman's plan then chasing him onto another...

What do you guys think?

Some server for trials, with just a little amount of content would rock. This could also be the portal to other worlds.

Combining Hubworld with Trialworld? Intriguing...I haven't quite got around to posting that thought yet. ;-)

I think this is probably among the best of the ideas you've suggested. Having such a hubworld would bring together the existing players, as well as help give new players a sense of direction.

Can't you just imagine a unified Graal? It's such a nice thought.

I believe a great addition to hubworld would be player and guild housing. Everything could be automated and global strings could be used to buy furniture and other things that people earn on other servers for hubworld. There could be different types of buildings to have housing (Apartments, Houses, Mansions, etc).

*shrugs* Sure, why not? I wasn't thinking along those lines, but Stefan's proven a canny scripter can make server-controlled automatic houses...they can pay for their rent with Global Gralats.

My name is Maikel and I approve this thread.

Just change the Login server so its like GK when a trial logs in and has those lamp post things to pick the island. Display the playercounts above each server. Be creative about it! If a player walks near the GK thing have their character turn into a GK person or something.


EDIT:
On a semi-unrelated note, remember that Graalympics server where you would pick your home server and you spawn in a well-known area of the server? I always thought that was the coolest thing ever.

I should hope so, that was my baby. 's what gave me the idea for this server too. :-)

's a good idea, loading their New Bodies while still in Hubworld. Like you walk behind the Classic screen and you get your Classic body, enter the Zone phonebooth and come out as your Zone body, etcetera...with sufficiently complex Global Strings, you could even edit your Classic appearance and ask the good people of Classic to transfer it over when you go in.

If this "one server" is G2k2 like I wouldn't play it. :(

G2K2? I don't follow - you trying to say If it's Kingdom style?

It'd make more sense to be classicstyle anyway. Interior? Space station? Cave? Town? I kinda like the idea of it being a town personally; grassy, with areas in varying styles for each PW's gate (a level13 style level, a Zone style area, a few Kingdoms houses...)
How does everyone else see it?

I actually like the idea of newbieland and hubland being one place. it would need a pretty powerful server though because it would become popular --fast.

NewbieHubland might need to be fast, but what if it's just wicked efficient? No walls to walk through means no you can just use clientside movement...no stats to hack means nothing to put serverside...:-)

You know, we could just make this trial world and hubworld, and then when done show stefan/unixmad. They may approve of it and accept it (hopefully). But we ideally want them involved.

*shrugs* Sure, I'm game. By any chance do you have a dev. server? ;-)

If I sort out my password from when they were all disabled, and my IP range from when I was a global, I have 'olympia'

*shrugs* If you can do it, count me in.

Olympia...heh, perfect.

Hey, I'd be up to helping out. Servers could even throw their own newbie courses into a hub world, but mostly I see it being like level14.

Another thing that could be considered is stat-free sparring/pking. Sparring could be like tournament style, and PKing could be like first to 100 kills wins.

Even another thing that could be considered could be an events feed for each server?

Sure, give each server some scripted-level-control over their portal. Say we build it like a pizza, or maybe a dartboard, and each server controls a slice...egads, how many servers should we account for? Well, I guess if we need to add another ring outside the main few, we could do that...like up front we have Classic, Zone, Kingdoms, Reserved-For-3D, and set half-a-level back we have 8 of the big boys, then 16 more player-run servers...

Quests or no quests? If it's newbieworld we need to have something like that to keep 'em busy...the Flash Arcade and Bank in the center's only so entertaining...

Oh yeah, Massokre, can we use your System? Figure we gotta start somewhere, and your movement-throwing-etc. system is as close to Default as we're likely to find...short of just using unscripted movement. I really don't have the foggiest idea what the processor load's gonna be like for this project, let alone the hack index...
Maybe make the overworld run on unscripted movement and lock down the dungeons, or something...kinda like the concept of Kingdoms, the overworld doesn't HAVE blocking tiles to worry about...something like that. Security can wait until we have an overworld.
And the overworld can wait until we have a tileset...I mean, we could use just the Classic tiledef, but that's a skoch unfair to the other worlds...
Maybe the overworld is Classic Tiledef and their warp-houses have interiors drawn from their own tiledefs...So you go into a weird looking but Classic house and inside it's all Zone'd out...Or we can get real clever with addtiledef2 and have the variant houses (lava house, snow house) replaced with the house-tiles of other servers...

Yea, anyone's welcome to use it, although I wouldn't use much of the GUI stuff because that tends to jack up processing time.

Naturally, the cleaner the better. Hey Sparky, any luck digging up that password?
I mean, it won't really be Done until we get the Global tools to connect the servers up, but we could still tile it. (which is to say, I can beat a level generator against it and make something g'dawful)

Isn't there a clientside serverwarp function?

Serverwarp, yes...we could certainly have the warp gates, but the really fun bits, like carrying over data from other servers (such as, This is my appearance on Classic, I should transform into this appearance as I near the Classic gate - or - I have all the hearts on Classic, so do I get a prize on Hubworld?) need Server Strings. But I can't get in touch with Stefan to find out if he even thinks it's a worthwhile idea to implement, so...*hint hint*

That would be a difficult idea to implement with ganis being server-specific, so it would make hubworld a lot less independent. Therefore I don't think Stefan would go for that.

This is a bad idea.

*shrugs* I did it on the first Olympia just fine. You figure there are going to be server-specific warpgates for the specific servers, server-specific boards for advertising server-specific events, why not transload the server-specific ganis and load up players' server-specific appearance for when they return from that specific-server's server-specific warpgate?

Otherwise, hubworld's kinda pointless. Yet Another Server from which you can choose a server to Hop to.

The difference is that it offers a social aspect between different server's, and that's Graal's most marketable feature.

And, like Esperanto, I'd like it to be as neutral as possible. I mean, it'd be a cinch to make a giant Level14 with classic-style characters and classic-style warpgates, but it wouldn't fit with the Kingdoms motif...and I could make a Kingdoms world, but that'd suck for the people whose computers can't handle Kingdoms in the first place. Letting people keep their ganis (and as much of their appearance as I can muster) on the Common Ground makes it more Common, and Common is good.

Also - drat, I had hoped I'd still have access to Graalympus but it doesn't even appear on the server list for me.

The only reason I actually understood that Esperanto reference is because my friend Evan handed in his last linear algebra assignment typed up in Esperanto.

You could probably get away with using head/shield/sword/body/colors/attr with defaults set if they don't exist in the hubworld. You could also make a dual-gani system for Kingdoms/Zone characters.

's a fair point...we can use the defaults until a system exists to replace them...

Yea, abstraction exists for a reason, it's just that stefan and unixmad stopped promoting standard variables.

The database of custom player graphics (heads/shields/etc.) isn't global.
They're promoting customization of things (custom movement, HD)
They're demoting the use of integrated systems (deprecated MAPIMG in gmaps)

This is all good for variety, but not anywhere close to good for global coordination.

Although I think GUI controls are going in the right direction.

Ooh, right, yeah...I'd have to have a way of either leeching, pooling, or copying every server's graphics directory. Which would be awesome for a hubworld anyway, I mean, preloading for the win, but it's One More Thing we need Stefan for.

I would love to help you guys out as I have done tons of work on Maloria with log-in screens and the like.

What is the server name you are working on this called?

We don't really have one yet, but we'll certainly appreciate the help when we get one. :-P

Alright well I have all my contacts in my signiture :)
Come on Maloria Dev if you care to see what I can do.

Interestingly enough i was already planning on something similar for my server in itself, you basicaly start in a menu that says load options or new game, and when selecting new or load you get warped there and you choose where to go.

This could easily be one of the greatest things to grace graal, deciding how it would look would be deffinatly tough, maybe it could be some kind of combination for example, if you ever played gauntlet dark legacy, the "hub" which leads to all the worlds, will change in its appearance as you near said portal, for example, ice portal has surrounding glaciers and well ice, and castle world puts you on the top of one,

just a thought, i think this would be really awsome,

but as for the poll, i think the website could still seriously use an update, at least a stand alone update, so that nothing looks extremely out of date and old information like say, old halloween quests that stuck arround on anti flash graal for what was it 6 months?

Ooo that is a great idea! Managers of this world could also give maybe limited rights to Managers of other PWs to these sections? Might give more incentive for a PW to get at least hosted if not classic?

Yeah, I was figuring I'd make it similar to old Graalympus, where Kingdoms players wake up in the hold of a ship, and Classic players appear in the Brothers' House...'cept the other way around in a sense, the Classic Players go through an Obviously Magical Warp Whirlpool, and come back out of it when they return to Hubworld...etcetera.

Limited managerial control - other servers can submit updates to their portals and so forth, and communication will of course be critical - if they've got a new quest and want it to be reflected on Hubworld, I gotta know - but not much more than that; don't want it turning into Zone 2 just because the Zone manager's really active, for instance.

Oh I never ment rc rights...
I was talking about in-game editors...meaning only tile and pre-def npcs editing ;)
(Like I have made)

It's a fair idea (see also: Tyhm's attempt to comission an online quest editor for the players), but the trouble I'd run into with that is they'd need to upload their servers' images...so ultimately someone's gotta be on RC to accept such things in person. Could give them super-limited RC though...they can upload graphics and ganis into one subfolder, they can use your in-game editor on one level only...