Artisan Archive
Thread: Idea: Blank Data Disk
This is an idea I've been tossing around for awhile trying to refine.
I'm sure I'm not the only one out there that has numerous emails saved up with instructions on how do do something, how to get something, greeting emails for new guildmembers or city members, or whatever. Some of these emails contain waypoints and other very useful information. Information that I want to keep and perhaps even sell.
The only question is "how?". Well I have the answer. What I propose is a new novice artisan item/schematic, a blank data disk. It would be a fairly simple item to craft; maybe 2 metal and 1 chemical. Now alone it isn't too remarkable, BUT given a few tweaks to the in-game mail system it could be an incredible device to have.
The only change to the mail would be the addition of a new option, "Save". "Save" would allow players to save an email to a blank disk (send, subject, message body, and attachments) and then delete the message from the player's mailbox.
The data disk once it has been written to would then be renamed from "blank data disk" (or whatever the crafter originally called it) to the subject line of the saved mail. Options included in the disk's radial menu would be: "Examine", "Destroy", "Read", "Load into Mail".
"Examine" and "Destroy" are typical of any item. Nothing new here.
"Read" would bring up a mail message box window so that players could read the contents of the disk.
"Load into Mail" would input the mail message into a player's mailbox where it could be forwarded, etc... but in doing so the disk itself would be destroyed.
I thought about an "Erase" option for the disk so that it could be re-used but I think the disk itself is fairly simple and inexpensive that one could just buy another disk, or crate of disks.
So what does this give you? Basically, portable and transferable information outside of one's mailbox that could be sold on a vendor. Possibilies for usage of such a tool are wide ranging. RPing alone I think could embrace this in setting up quests and events. It would also mean an end to all that out-of-game post-it notes and paper that many of us use to keep track of important information. And relatively speaking the amount of information to be stored is not much more than the stats of most items and resources already.
So what do you think? Reply with your comments, suggestions, changes, and/or improvements?
This is a great idea. If they are going to let us have e-mail that we can pass around why not something like this. However, I don't think we should require to purchase/craft our own discs. That's boring and useless. Instead just make it so that when you save an e-mail, a disk is created with all the data on the disc.
Just take the advice of the forums which I'm looking at asI reply to this thread.
"When writing your message, remember to keep the language clean."
wow....hardware INSIDE the software! I LOVE IT!
Would also be useful with data terminals too if we could find a way to integrate them....maybe the data terminals are enchanced email stations????
This is the same kind of thing I proposed in this thread
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=artisan&message.id=25355
Other things we could place on disks
Missions
Scimatics
Droid personality, data recovery backup disk!
Macro's
hehe the possibilties are endless
Pistol wrote:
This is a great idea. If they are going to let us have e-mail that we can pass around why not something like this. However, I don't think we should require to purchase/craft our own discs. That's boring and useless. Instead just make it so that when you save an e-mail, a disk is created with all the data on the disc.
I'm glad you think this is a great idea. I hope others will as well.
That said, I really wanted this to be an item that could be crafted by novice artisans as I think SWG has a good thing going where everything is player made - but the system itself here is what is truly important.
True the disk would not be exceptionally hard to craft (nor should it be) but itcould be one of those few novice artisan items that people would actually want and give those starting out something that people actually want and thus lend itself to the economy.
Though your idea may be simpler to implement. We'll see if a dev may actually pick up on this.
/shrug
ASHRID wrote:
This is the same kind of thing I proposed in this thread
Thanks Ashrid. I'll include your proposal here as well so we can develop and discuss it.
Here's your take on it:
Wouldnt it be cool if artisans could make datapads and viewscreens, these could be used to decorate a building as well as to record and display messages
I have visions of a viewscreen in my shop telling customers important info, or handing a friend a datapad with a message on it (perhaps a single waypoint capacity) telling him where something can be found.
I guess our ideas are sort of similar at that. It shows I'm not alone in wanting this.
star_Slayer wrote:
Other things we could place on disks
Missions
Scimatics
Droid personality, data recovery backup disk!
Macro's
hehe the possibilties are endless
Macros! Yes, so many times I've had people request a macro to do something and I've had to type it out. It'd be nice if I could copy it to a disk and distribute it, or even sell it.
Yes, the possibilities ARE endless! Keep 'em coming!
That's a great idea about a price list!!!
Now when someone asks the properties on my armor I could just e-mail them a price list with all the armor's details and a waypoint and be done with it.
I could even put out catalogs which I could sell on the bazaar for 1 credit. This would help put my name out and give people some reference to prices that they could carry with them.