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Heptagon_ru
22nd September 2014, 13:30
Recently I had to talk a lot with a person while dealing with an interesting issue on his plot which I support.
He soon went offline and I sent him about 15 emails about the situation development.
It's very uncomfortable - the in-game email has only 1 line, I guess it's shorter than even that Twitter thing :)

You can say: use TeamSpeak/Forum/E-mail. Well, they all are out-of-game and have other disadvantages:
TeamSpeak is not very popular and it's hard to convince person to install it. It requires being online simultaneously. It is more for people who are real-life friends and come to play together.
Forum is "slow" and it seems not many people are registered. Also it's out of the game, requires switching away, or better disconnect to not die from hunger. Well, PM could be an option, but first i have to ask is the person registered, by which name ...
E-mail - too private, not many people would share emails (I wouldn't :) ). Also probably not much used now, considering all those modern Facebook-like things.

An interesting in-game offline communication option could be some Book&Quill mail system. Book&Quill is pretty cheap, can be reused many times, allows to write big texts - I'm even trying to make an in-game diary in it.
But how to comfortably pass a book to a recipient, an offline one?

For one-time peer-to-peer thing I could make a lockette-d chest close to Spawn and mail person it's coords.
Comfortable enough, but again takes more time then I would like to spend: selecting place, making chest, putting sign, manually copying coordinates to mail, remembering to destroy the chest ...
I could also make such chest near person's town, but it is even less comfortable - I lack free sethomes and outposts. And some cool people live enormously far.

Is it possible to make some kind of a shared post-office? A one standard place close to Spawn, where it would be very easy to leave such messages to people and exchange them? And also guarantee mail safety.
Not necessarily admin-made or scripted or ender-chest-like. Maybe it is possible to do even by an ordinary user (e.g. me).
Maybe some combination of plot permissions and lockette would allow it easily?
Certainly this raises new questions, e.g. how to manage such mail with potential ~600 towns and ~4000 users ...

Please advice, share ideas, criticize.

Jiro_89
22nd September 2014, 16:55
Well I certainly wouldn't say you have to be real life friends to make teamspeak work. I have plenty of friends on the TerraFirmaCraft server (most of which don't play nearly as often anymore), and I would say that if anything using teamspeak with them has strengthened the friendships during gameplay. Alas, that's besides the question though.

If you'd like to make a custom post office I don't see any problem in that. Permissions would be difficult though. If it were just your nation mates you could allow ally only perms on for switching and that's all you'd need for chest/door access. You could probably also pull it off by allying your nations. I know for all these towns to be in the same nation would be quite difficult if near impossible because everybody has their own taste in towns/nations, but that doesn't stop you from allying with their nation [/n ally add nationname].

Another possibility is by using friend permissions, so shutting off the perms to all but friends and then adding the specific people you want to have access to your mail system by using [/res friend add name] or [/res friend add+ name]<-if they're offline.

InsaneJ
22nd September 2014, 17:22
I like the idea of having a post office. However as Jiro pointed out permission wise it would be difficult.

Perhaps a better idea would be to look for a Bukkit plugin that does what you want: send larger messages to offline players. I'll see if I can find something that does this. But feel free to look through the available plugins yourself as well :)

http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/
(http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/)

*edit*
I found a postal plugin that uses Citizens 2 NPC's to hand deliver books. It does seem like it's quite a bit of work to set up. But if one of the staff members is willing to do that, then I'll set it up :)

ethe334
22nd September 2014, 17:50
I love everything to do with citizens. I'll take a look at it later.

InsaneJ
22nd September 2014, 17:54
Oops, forgot to post the link :B

http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/postal/

It even has Dynmap support so you can track your letters in real time :)

Jiro_89
22nd September 2014, 17:58
Oops, forgot to post the link :B

http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/postal/

It even has Dynmap support so you can track your letters in real time :)

Now THAT is a sweet plugin. *vote yes* :P

Heptagon_ru
22nd September 2014, 18:19
Oops, while i was writing the answer, the conversation advanced a lot. And mostly my answer lost value :). Keep it in mind while reading :)))

The teamspeak topic is interesting and very within the question, because maybe I don't need do sth new, just don't know how to use existing stuff well and comfortable. So any experience is highly welcome.

Sth like general example/timeline of relations development, like how you started talking, how u convinced people to join teamspeak, what were u talking about when building absolutely separate projects, how did u managed/fell people come and go, etc.

E.g. in my case the necessity to talk is rare, but intensive. Sometimes I need to discuss a new build or a situation with plots, etc, and it would be an intensive but short discussion. And during the rest of my online time discussion would probably distract me, and I'm already doing everything slow. So I can not ask people (especially server's elders) to install teamspeak only to talk to me 5 minutes. I will better spend some time and write some short mails ...

For now I didn't have many encounters via teamspeak, except occasional help to a person unable to login because of crash :) and a person from another town, who we don't have much common to speak about :) Also there were a group of people one time, but they don't come any more ... And they were from another town again, so I mostly listened them like an interesting documentary radio :)
Well, I'm only a tree-puncher yet. So reading another people generalized experience is very interesting.

Thank you very much for the nation, ally and friends ideas.

Since nation ally management can also affect plot permissions in all towns, i.e. giving access to ally-open plots to many other people from other nations, I guess it it more complicated and potentially dangerous method.

The friends method seems fine for small number of members. If I will create a public postoffice for all my friends, and allow them to safely exchange mail with each other peer to peer, this will require number of postboxes (2-person locketted chests) equal to N!/(2*(N-2)!) for N people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combination). So 3 for 3 people, 6 for 4, ...
But if more people would like to use it, i will have to add them all to friends ... here start complications ...

So I have got another idea: people can make mailbox plots in their towns. I.e. the town spawn plot will allow friends of that person to switch, and will mostly contain only mailboxes for each of friends. Even is the owner doesn't allow people to pass to the town - it's ok, the door will be out of the mailbox plot. So I tp in, put letter to "my" mailbox and /mail person "u got new quill mail".

Sounds good (theoretically) ? I understand that probably nobody will bother making such plot :) But in theory - will work? How about keg griefers, like some younger brother under friend's account coming to my mail plot and blow up a keg - there will be no problems because of TNT is always switched off?

Jiro_89
22nd September 2014, 18:27
So I have got another idea: people can make mailbox plots in their towns. I.e. the town spawn plot will allow friends of that person to switch, and will mostly contain only mailboxes for each of friends. Even is the owner doesn't allow people to pass to the town - it's ok, the door will be out of the mailbox plot. So I tp in, put letter to "my" mailbox and /mail person "u got new quill mail".

Sounds good (theoretically) ? I understand that probably nobody will bother making such plot :) But in theory - will work? How about keg griefers, like some younger brother under friend's account coming to my mail plot and blow up a keg - there will be no problems because of TNT is always switched off?


The friend plot will work that way as well. It's the same permission concept, just done on a smaller scale. As for the keg question, if explosions are turned off there will be no physical keg block damage. However, entities can still take damage in protected town chunks. It wouldn't be hard for me to figure out what happened through prism, I have enough experience with kegs to understand how they affect the environment in protected/unprotected ways. I expect the few people that have reached the level of kegs to be responsible as well.

Heptagon_ru
22nd September 2014, 18:29
The comments to the Postal plugin tell that it eats memory very fast. :(

The plugin and especially NPCs are cool!
At least will enjoy watching the videos after work, maybe it will give some new ideas. And will try to search plugins.
Thank you for support, guys!

Heptagon_ru
22nd September 2014, 21:09
After a quick search (game calls) here's another plugin:
http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/mailbox-plugin/
Short video of usage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTymR11jeXA
Seems nice.

Heptagon_ru
27th September 2014, 18:00
So 24 September I experienced the first quill mail exchange, thanks to craftengineer. :) I hope it was the first one on the server :)

It was in that new Free Stuff place near Spawn (north). The owner, craftengineer, made a private mail box room (as I understand instantly right after reading my suggestion in this topic) for supporters of his place, because he really needed an efficient way to exchange ideas between supporters and the owner, while this new awesome place was evolving. (And he was tired of reading my 15 emails one day :))) )
And the mailing helped a lot, it was much easier to explain some wanted features, I enjoy supporting this place with surplus production more and more.

The discovered disadvantage of quill mail is that it's not easy to delete all text. U need to backspace all the characters in the mail, which is not comfortable for big bloated mails like mine :) Will see ... :)

Will describe this and other amazing free stuff places in a separate topic.

(all mentioned owners have given their explicit agreement to be named and described)