For those of you who don't know what that is, it was detailed in the earlier post of 'Should we do a XenogearsMUCK Original Characters Perfect Works'?

Everyone seems thrilled with the idea. So I decided to do the easiest part first: A PW-style character sheet. So I created a demo one, copying PW as best I can. Which isn't that good. :P But please, give me your opinions. And if you have a better design, please upload it for review.

http://www.kitsune.cx/~kieli/xmocpw/dirah.htm

Now, a number of things to note with this layout:

1) The picture is awful, and is only there to show where the picture would go. All pictures will be PW-style upper torso/shoulders-up pictures of the characters, which you can click on to see the full picture (if applicable).

2) This layout allows only 4-6 things in the History Section, which will detail major character events that happened before the MUCK started.

3) The sections around it detail significant events that happened after the game started.

I'd like to keep away from a personality review of the character on this page, since you can get that information from +finger. Some personality description is fine, but I'd prefer it stick to major personality traits, and mostly serve as an explanation of the character.

These should be designed to tailor to people who have no idea of anything going on on the MUCK.

So, what does everyone think? The entire XMOCPW page layout is yet to be decided: It'd probably work best with frames (yick). Collin suggested that this be a right frame, and the left frame be filled with the characters you can view, as well as other sections you can view (In this case, the Game History).

I'm not quite sure how to organize that, though.

Any ideas/suggestions/improvements?

Discussion on the History Section coming later.

By Domi on Saturday, March 16, 2002 - 09:28 pm:

A much better aligned one is here:

http://xenomuck.8m.com/xmocpw/dirah.htm

Stupid kitsune wasn't letting me upload with less than 10 minutes of lag, apparently. O_o

That bar at the top bothers me, however. ^^; Wherever the XMOCPW gets put up, it ought to be on a webpage provider with no bar at the top. Dunno quite where, though.

By Harmony on Sunday, March 17, 2002 - 04:16 am:

It looks quite nice, through I think it should be a better color scheme than brown and drap yellow. Maybe differant colors for differant people?

By Domi on Sunday, March 17, 2002 - 06:49 pm:

I know it's drab. ^^ I just copied it directly off of Perfect Works--In which all of the character pages are rather plain, yet functional.

But that's something of an idea... Do we want to be obsessively true to PW to the point of being all uniform? Because, if no one's terribly opposed to it, having this color scheme be the default but letting people choose the colors might be interesting.

Of course, my sense of adventure is limited to changing the bar colors and the history box. That way the pages are varied, without having the page background go from white to gold to whatnot, which would make the page loose it's sense of coherancy... You know, the feeling that all the pages are part of the same group. Gyah! I make no sense on 5 hours of sleep, I know.

Of course, feel free to shoot this design down if you want, too. I'm sure there are more talented webdesigners out there than me. Mostly because I suck.

By Gabriel on Monday, March 18, 2002 - 02:27 am:

Firstly, you do not suck.

Secondly, I'm perfectly content with the layout as it is. I think that those who would have seen the original Perfect Works book will like that sense of continuity-- I, for one, love how we sometimes blend seemlessly into the game. That's kind of the feel I think it should have; as if the game COULD have been what we are--- if it had lots more time and more charecters than Suikoden. ^^;

By Brin on Monday, March 18, 2002 - 04:08 am:

I'm agreeing here. It'd be nice to have it with the look-and-feel of PW (*WANTS PW*). It can be easily changed if done correctly. I could do up a nice content management system, so epople could submit their information, and the page gets automatically generated?

Oh, and if Kitsune's not cromulent enough for it, Domi, I'm sure I could host it somewhere.

By Dominia on Tuesday, March 19, 2002 - 05:50 pm:

That... would be really cool, Brin. O_O If not for the fact that people would likely abuse it.. But that means we just hide the address for the creation page from the general public, so people not on the game can't run by and randomly generate for fun. >_>

Of course, the tricky part would be the character picture. The idea Collin suggested would be that, since all of the character pictures have to be a uniform size (that we'll have to decide on), clicking on them would lead to the full-sized picture. But force-miniturizing pictures with a program might distort them. Erk. Tricky.

And, for those of us with no character pictures, the thing looks just fine without any at all, although it is a little plain.

And Kitsune is wonderful. It just hates me personally and refuses to let me upload without sacrficing a goat to it.

By Collin on Tuesday, March 19, 2002 - 10:41 pm:

Actually, you don't have to scale down the picture... just crop out a particular part that would be a thumbnail or other representation to the artwork.

By Duran on Wednesday, March 20, 2002 - 01:48 am:

Collin hit the nail on the head, unfortunately...(I wanted to say it! >_<) but yeah, just copy/paste like a thumbnail of their head, then post that. The thing that might look potentially weird is that is looks TOO little, so might want to leave it...150x150? If that's too big, try 100x100! :D

By Duran on Wednesday, March 20, 2002 - 02:00 am:

Collin hit the nail on the head, unfortunately...(I wanted to say it! >_<) but yeah, just copy/paste like a thumbnail of their head, then post that. The thing that might look potentially weird is that is looks TOO little, so might want to leave it...150x150? If that's too big, try 100x100! :D

By Domi on Wednesday, March 20, 2002 - 04:24 am:

That just means that everyone will have to upload two pictures though, wont it? And that'd take up twice as much space. Which may or may not be a problem.

By Ryoji on Friday, March 22, 2002 - 01:52 am:

Just host the seperate pictures on some other account from one of the various free hosts out there.

By Brin on Friday, March 22, 2002 - 10:48 am:

I could have it so the thumbnail optionally links to a larger picture offsite?

By Domi on Friday, March 22, 2002 - 07:17 pm:

Aha! That'd work wonderfully, Brin. ^^ So only one picture is hosted on whatever page that the XMOCPW is on, and it links to another picture that's hosted on the player's webspaces. Nice!

By Casske on Thursday, March 28, 2002 - 12:46 am:

...yeah! That's right! ...*coughs slightly, falls down*

By Duran on Thursday, March 28, 2002 - 01:21 am:

I just noticed I posted twice...(o_O)

Anyway, I just thought of another thing. If we used frames, how will the frames change from character to character? If I remember, frames bleed over to other linked pages (ah, the wonders of simply HTML) so I'm sorta confused at the moment.

By Domi on Thursday, April 04, 2002 - 03:21 am:

I hate frames. Can we not do them? ^^

By Gabriel on Thursday, April 04, 2002 - 09:18 pm:

I know they're a bitch to code, but they look SO PRETTY when they're done right... ^^;

By Brin on Friday, April 05, 2002 - 07:02 pm:

Frames = sux0rz.

I like Domi's page, actually. It's the template I'm working off for the software I'm writing for this.