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[Kriellya]

EDITEDIT: @Kriellya: Also, any idea about how you are planning to make the template work?

Made a 'left' and 'right' template, slammed the stats and skills template together, removed physical stats, and added the name of the controlling character above it. It makes a giant brick of black and green that will look *wonderful* on the cheat sheet

[Parisbre56]

Also remember to change their status so that the fact that chief has difficulty controlling the thing, the fact that it is very dense and tall and probably affected by the injection Anita took and any other beneficial statuses the affected bodies might had.

@Kriellya: Yeah, just took a quick look at it. It's not pretty, but it works. Might be better to make a physical attributes template to put in the centre of the top of the attribute section and then put the mental attributes below that, using something like

Code: [Select]

<div style="margin: auto;">{{physical}}</div>
<div style="clear:both;"></div>
<div style="float: left;">{{mental1}}</div><div style="float: right;">{{mental2}}</div>
etc.and other style markers to make sure they are in the right place. Just to remove the unnecessary information and the need for two templates that do basically the same thing.

[Kriellya]

You say this as if I have any ability to use html style flags (hint: I don't )

I definitely like that idea, this was just the quick-and-dirty get the information on a page so people can see it answer. We can fiddle with the formatting as we go.

[Parisbre56]

Wait, based on that: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=135884.msg6370639#msg6370639
All stats are considered physical.
But mind is both physical and metnal. Somehow.
So we keep the stats template and put it on the top of the attributes and also keep your monstrosity for mind and the skills.

EDIT: Wait, you already saw that, nevermind. Doing this from a phone is slow...

[Kriellya]

Wait, based on that: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=135884.msg6370639#msg6370639
All stats are considered physical.
But mind is both physical and metnal. Somehow.
So we keep the stats template and put it on the top of the attributes and also keep your monstrosity for mind and the skills.

yeah, just need to center the stats template, remove the attribute template.

[Parisbre56]

You could edit the stats template by adding another variable so that it allows you to edit its alignment and default to the currently default alignment. So that this:

Code: [Select]

{| style="font-size: 14px; float: left; margin: 0 0 0em 0em; border: 0.5px solid limegreen; background: limegreen; padding: 1px 1px; color:green; text-align: left;" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" width="49.5%"Becomes this:

Code: [Select]

{| style="font-size: 14px; float: {{{float|left}}}; margin: 0 0 0em 0em; border: 0.5px solid limegreen; background: limegreen; padding: 1px 1px; color:green; text-align: left;" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" width="49.5%"
So then to centre it, the following should work, at least based on what I read:

Code: [Select]

<div style="margin: auto;">
{{NStats|float=none|etc}}
</div>

[Kriellya]

Doesn't seem to be, at least on my system. Though I can get it to float left or right now, so I should be able to use that to replace the dual templates with one if we care (I might care enough, but for a 1-page template?)

EDIT: Got it working. Float fights the margin system kind of hard. I ended up shoving the table into a centered box, and adding width as a parameter to the template, so I could tell it to take up all the space in the box. I might move those features into Skills, if we can think of a use for them.

[Nikitian]

"I'd like to get a few items please. Could I have a Monoatomic Razor, a blaster pistol, and a kilo of Aster-Ex with short range detonator please. And as many frag grenades as 1 token will buy me"

Do I get a token from this?

A universal chem thrower with an extra sticky goop canister (3+1 tokens) for civilians, trapping things I can't or don't want to kill and closing atmospheric breaches.

And from this? Do I or Pancaek get a token? Maybe say we take turns getting a token from a chem thrower sale? And what about the purchase of the ammo?

I think it's time we start tallying the tinker royalties as Piecewise said. I'm up to looking through the recent purchases, and I'm currently contacting Piecewise on the matter of the more complex issues of this system like the ones brought up by RC.

[Radio Controlled]

Personally, I'd think 1-token items should only pay out a token per 2 (or 3) units sold. Aka I'd only get a token once another person buys a blistol. I'd say ammo either doesn't count, or uses the same method. As for collaborations, I'd say just let the participants figure it out on their own (I'm sure me and Pan will come to an agreement easily).

[Egan_BW]

Maybe keep a tally of player-made items bought and pay out at the end of the mission cycle?

[Nikitian]

Personally, I'd think 1-token items should only pay out a token per 2 (or 3) units sold. Aka I'd only get a token once another person buys a blistol. I'd say ammo either doesn't count, or uses the same method. As for collaborations, I'd say just let the participants figure it out on their own (I'm sure me and Pan will come to an agreement easily).

I've asked him on collaborations, and no, I don't think that would cut it. Piecewise suggested very wisely an effective system that has one goal in mind: have Tinkerers design reasonably affordable designs, and no outlandish luxuries. What you suggest would effectively doom all 1-token items, with their authors consciously pushing them into 2-token category. No, for the sake of Scientific Advancement, you should get a whole token every time a blistol or its battery is purchased. That's how it works. Every tinkerer should be aspiring to achieve as much. Shut up and take my tokens. 

(You could make a case that 5-token/9-token/etc. items are better for their creators than 4-token/8-token/etc. ones, but there is but one problem: 4-token item would give the creator just the same amount of royalties as a 2-token or 1-token would - but guess how demand curve is sloped at those price levels; going as low as you can (rather than slightly higher) is very often the best idea out there, and, as I said, it is working as intended.)

Maybe keep a tally of player-made items bought and pay out at the end of the mission cycle?

That could work, but maybe it could be easier to add the tokens just as we wiki the relevant piece of equipment and deduct the payment. Less things to constantly keep track of, I think.

[Nikitian]

I got a reply from Piecewise. Both PMs, as they were:

A few questions about the 'successful Tinker design' royalties you introduced not long ago (25% off each purchase, rounded up):

1)Are those retroactive? That might take a little time, but is certainly doable (at least, say, since with the Hephaestus defense ending as cut-off date). I'd think it feels more right, since it was a period when no one really profited from their work (unlike earlier when prototypes were essentially gifts from Steve to the tinkerer), but you clearly might have a different reasoning in mind, so I'd like that clarified.

2)How do collaborative designs work in this regard? The latest being what culminated in Xan's body, with no less than three or four people throwing around ideas until Paris came to you with the final one. Who'd get paid were Medi-bodies armory-available and purchased by people?

3)How do derivative designs work in that regard? I can see two sub-variants here: a)when a trooper requests a custom variation on the design right from the Armory and simply gets it (e.g. Paris buying an oversized monosword, Corsair buying half-thick Milnoplate); b)when someone takes up an earlier design and improves upon it (or just brings it up-to-date) (e.g. syvarris modifying and updating Milnoplate; me making three distinct sub-exoskeleton variants back then)

To questions 2&3 a quick answer could probably be given in the form of "he who gets admitted as design author to the Armory gets all the royalties", thus pushing off the problem into IC plane (and making it Hephaestus Head of Engineering's headache instead of yours), but then I would like to ask you for guidelines.

4)How does the OOC design authorship relate to IC design authorship? Basically, who's the official author, the player or the character, and does a following character gain any tokens on behalf of designs invented earlier by the same player? (This arose from Tinker leaving the strict confines of IC and moving to OOC IRC, I'd say )
(e.g. Empiricist's previous character making the Aux-turret, and Pyro's previous character making the Sibilus gauss-rocket riflt; would their current characters get any tokens from the relevant purchases nowadays?)

1) If someone wants to dig back through and find all the times someone bought something, then sure.

2) Whoever submits it gets it but they can give out money to those who they think earned it as well.

3) Royalties is an option. A form of copy right is another. Beating up people who try to take your designs is a third. I'm not sure which I'm for more.

4) We'll go with Player. I assume this will take a while to make anyone money, so having it restricted to a single life is a bit too harsh.

So, I can draw the following conclusions:
1)It actually might be a good idea to have all tokens earned by a player-tinkerer tallied on a dedicated page, and then probably 'withdrawn' from account by their players regularly (whenever suitable by characters, so either on the Sword after/instead of going on missions, or on Hephaestus just whenever).
2)There might be drama and even shanking in the showers with the design authorship, so we should be extra cautious with that when unilaterally declaring the design creators on wiki
3)There's going to be hell of a Fun re-reading and picking out whenever a player-designed item was bought from the Armory, and we all know that someone (me, you, or maybe that guy out there) is eventually going to accomplish that, if only from boredom/to help the cause. 

[Radio Controlled]

I really don't know if the retroactive token thing is such a good idea. I mean, who would go digging through the entire 29018 posts of the on-ship thread to find all of the instances of player-bought stuff? Or will it be a system where people have to claim their own tokens and go digging themselves (aka tokens for those with the time and patience for that)? I'd say starting fresh in this case will give the least headaches (and note that, by a first rough tally, I'd be getting around 7-ish tokens by retroactive sales, so this isn't coming from jealousy of other people getting tokens).

3) Royalties is an option. A form of copy right is another. Beating up people who try to take your designs is a third. I'm not sure which I'm for more.

We could go with 'let the players sort it out, and let pw or the council decide if they can't work out an agreement'.

3)There's going to be hell of a Fun re-reading and picking out whenever a player-designed item was bought from the Armory, and we all know that someone (me, you, or maybe that guy out there) is eventually going to accomplish that, if only from boredom/to help the cause. 

So, I take it you are officially volunteering then?

4) We'll go with Player. I assume this will take a while to make anyone money, so having it restricted to a single life is a bit too harsh.

I'd tie it to character personally, makes char death be more meaningful.


On that note, remember Miya's armor, exoskeleton, fuel and generator projects? The ones that are used in a lot of today's designs (assaultsuit, MCP-a (the exoskeleton, IIRC), heavy robobody, sharkmist armor, ...)? How about things like this? Maybe a system where, if a person uses components someone else designed (though in this case it's less 'designed', and more 'commissioned the research') this person gets paid a one-time sum for giving the 'right' to have his stuff used? Though this could lead to people not using the most current gen technology.

[Nikitian]

Piecewise is fine with it, which is most important; there hasn't been that many new designs until lately, so not a crapton of trouble; I think every Tinkerer who made a successful design in the past deserves those extra tokens (and no, it's not that influenced by me being one of them; my own revenue is mostly going to come from the newer designs like MCP-II and Force Monosword). And finally, I'd be just fine with the "Hephaestus Administration established"-cutoff date for this retroactiveness (for reasons I listed to Piecewise in the above pm), but he extended it to all the past game - which I honestly don't mind.
So yes, I think we shouldn't focus that much on 'starting fresh' as, per his own words, it takes a lot of time to earn meaningful amounts of tokens, so even the past tinker effort deserves it, I believe.

Yeah, I think that's what we could do. Not sure on the Council, they always seem to have it for power-grabbing, but I think players could just fine sort it out between themselves. For instance, goop thrower is listed on the wiki as joint effort by you (RC) and Pancaek; so I put the design authorship at you both - and you jointly are going to get the tokens and then divide them between the two of you. Sounds good, right?

I am not not volunteering, then. I have a huge to-do list on wiki updates, but I might have eventually come to doing that - or you could ask a newbie or two to fish up all the instances a player-designed item was bought in the past (hint: there were not many) seeing as more and more newbie-token-earning missions have been completed from the list. Or someone (wiki principle) might do it out of sheer free time, eventually.

I could argue for character authorship, but then we've had OOC tinker for quite a while by now, and then Piecewise said it's better to be player-related than character-related. Sure, breaks immersion a bit, but is kinder to poor Tinkerers (who might easily die before their designs are rightly appreciated, and char death is very meaningful as is, at least for the long-runners).

Those projects... Well, I've thought about it, and I think the following should apply: The person (people, working jointly) who made the revision that got into the Armory deserve the tokens. Full stop.
They are the ones listed as the creators; every other idea that went into the thought-soup can rightfully be mentioned, but unless that person styles himself as a co-creator (the whole "community decide between themselves", right in action), he doesn't get much for it. Mostly because preliminary work is either done by scientists/ARESTE (like "Miya's" generators-armor-etc. ), or are obsolete designs the author doesn't care to update (Milnoplate, I think, but I'll let syv and Caellath decide it between them). But your variant could also work.
(And what did you mean by "lead to people not using the most current gen technology"? Or did you mean the tinkerers themselves pay the original authors? That would have been abhorrent. The whole point of this is Steve pays us, and that eliminates any troubles with unfair tinker play. And anyway, I think any and all 'patent right' is anyway overridden by martial law of ARM, so we can do whatever, for the sake of this victory - all the while being ruled by the most powerful and important 'patent law' that so far works only here, unfortunately, chiefly because it's a game: 'not being a dick'. )

[Radio Controlled]

If it cost 4 tokens, then yes, you do.

Well, that kinda throws a kink in the works I'd say.