Writeable books?

[silverdraco]

I just got of a good quest in which I found a book case with books in them which appeared to be writeable.
As the quest was ended I asked the GM's if there is such a book in available in game. They said it was buy-able but that the quill writing system wasn't installed on it.
I tried to find information on this in the forums to see if it has been asked before but without luck.

So my question is:
Is it possible to have books available in game where players can write on, and in?

and if so,
Could it have more characters on it then the 10000 character that can be on the "Blank Lengthy Parchment"?


and if this all can be done.
could there also be books with different book covers? So that players don't all have the same book,or at least have a choice in books?

~Silverdraco

[RollinsCat]

I would love that.

[Acacea]

Much less concerned with the appearance of the books IG than the potential to break the character limit further. Even then though, the 10k gets you further than you'd think. Most of the books at the treehouse library are just IG parchments, but they usually perform the function desired of them.

[darkstorme]

I don't know exactly how the PC quill system works anymore, but it used to be (and may still be) dependent on how many blank spaces were put in a given document.

So a 10k character limit meant that someone copied-and-pasted until there were ten thousand "blank" characters in the description of the long parchment.

The problem with making "longer" parchments (or books) is that the blank spaces take up a byte apiece in the inventory of the person carrying them, or wherever they're stored.  The longer the parchment, the bigger the object, the longer the memory access.  So a large number of long quill-able items on a character will increase the loading lag that they create in logging in.  (That, I believe, was one of the purposes behind the parchment folder; moving those sizable objects out of PC inventories.)  It may, in fact, even be impossible to have a description much larger than that; I'm not sure how Bioware handles object descriptions.

[Dorganath]

Yeah, that's the origins of the limits, because at first we had used an NWNX extension to allow this scribing. It worked, but it had its warts, and further, we found that writing beyond the limits could crash the server, which of course...is very bad. This was not an issue on the scribeable parchments but rather on items that a GM custom-inscribed. Some items had very short descriptions originally, and their customized descriptions went beyond the limits of that, causing problems down the road.

Since Bioware added the SetDescription(...) function, they store this information differently and even allow the original description to be restored, so the server-crashing problems are really a thing of the past.

Currently, the parchment length is still enforced, since we have those various types of parchment with varying costs. I don't think there's really anything limiting the length at the moment, besides not wanting a lot of 10K+ items out there.

Regarding books...it wouldn't take much, and we could even make them 20K in length or something like that.  Having variable appearances is something different though. We currently can't afford the palette space to allow all the book cover possibilities we have available to us, and I don't think that books allow a dynamic change without that.  There are probably creative ways around this of course, but it wouldn't be a trivial thing to have a wide variety of visual options.

[Acacea]

If a wide variety of visual options was necessary for every functional item in place of our imaginations, we would not still be playing Neverwinter Nights...

[Dorganath]

Yeah, I know. hehe!  I was just addressing the original poster.

[Ravemore]

With all this being said... I would love to have books, even with limited characters.

[silverdraco]

As I thought, only the amount of characters is limited but the rest is possible.
But then again, it is probably depending on a few things whether or not writeable books would go in-game.

First; it would of course depend on the supply and demand.
and second; would the team have time to make it and get it in game.

To answer the first one I could make a poll out in the general discussion thread and see how people respond.
The second one only the Layo team can answer since only they know if they have time for it,
and knowing them I think there answer could be:
"...we get to it when we get to it."
Or something like that.


Edit: But I now need to find out how to make a Poll. :\

[Dorganath]

and knowing them I think there answer could be:
"...we get to it when we get to it."
Or something like that.

*shifty* ...something like that...