Hey people! It's time for one of these threads again!
Don't freak out! The RP tool's existence is not in jeopardy, we're going to keep working on it for as long as we possibly can! It's a labour of love, and we're not about to put it down or anything. What's happening here is that the number of people using the RP tool is growing quickly, sometimes by as much as a few dozen unique accounts a day, and as of the time I type this, there are 2,861 unique accounts out there who have at some point tried, used, and/or are still using the Lismore RP Tool. That's insane, and we'd never expected the tool to become this popular! But now that it is, it's opening up new opportunities for where we can take the tool. And also new caveats.
First, let me tell you a little about the current RP Tool that's in use today. It was created in response to an earlier RP tool that we used in Lismore which was no longer being developed, and so Erika, Xela & I started putting our heads together to create something that was meant to replace that very outdated tool. And from that, the first iteration of the Lismore RP Tool emerged. I'll be honest, it was BAD, and buggy as Hell, and as it was being tested & developed, we could at worst release both 3 or 4 updates for it
a day! It felt kind of like how I'd imagine it'd feel working at Microsoft trying to fix the inherently broken Vista OS. Only, y'know, we actually fixed the tool & made it better, as opposed to Microsoft who kind of just mucked about & ate s***!
It was always our goal to make a good RP tool for the players of Lismore, so at first the features were being designed specifically for that purpose. In hindsight, perhaps the tool should have been coded with a bit more flexibility in mind, but I'll get to that eventually.
As the tool neared its official release in Lismore, we finally managed to implement a good HUD design and the much requested server backup feature, two things we have had especially great feedback on! Thanks, you guys; you're awesome!
Then after release, we were surprised to learn that it wasn't just Lismorians who were using the tool anymore; we were getting feedback from players from other sims, and even from RP admins interested in making the RP tool their standard! Which was great, we were very honoured and eager to serve! Since then, we've been expanding the RP tool piece by piece, adding new features and optimizations (and a smaller HUD design!). The fact that the RP Tool now seems to be becoming a widely-used standard in the SL roleplaying community is something we're tremendously proud of, and it has also opened up for the possibilities of evolving the tool & make use of more advanced server infrastructure to enhance the tool's capabilities, and do things that weren't possible before. Ideas that have been thrown around have been an AddOn system, which I've said is in the works many times, but has turned out to be difficult to do with the current codebase. But what an AddOn system would mean for the tool, is that developers of other RP tools would be able to integrate native support for their creations (such as money systems, crafting systems, even combat systems) into the RP tool and offer them as installable modules.
We're looking at a potential equivalent to the Windows App store, or Google Play, where you could be able to upgrade your RP tool's features yourself with modules made specifically to integrate with it. For instance, it could enable a working money system to integrate with your character save files & securely store amounts of currency in them, that is then communicated to a server managing the RP economy for individual sims, effectively allowing the possibility of emulating real-life economy & making the RP world more interactive with both player and NPC merchants. This isn't something that's going to be a default functionality or developed by us, but when that time comes, we'll be able to offer our server to the developer of such a system to build its infrastructure & develop an economy module for the tool.
Another possibility would be a health system, where an active character could be afflicted with, say Polio, and a medical professional treating your character would be able to look up what kind effects it's having on your character, and a guide on how to RP treating it -- possibly for this and that time period, and it could even be affected by that particular medical professional's skill level, and so on. All this could be enabled simply by informing our servers you'd like a module to enable the functionality, and then installing it when you retrieve it.
Standardizing the RP Tool is now something we'd like to do, for there are so many ways in which the tool can assist & enhance the RP experience, as well as providing educational material to those who would like it (such as people RPing medical professionals, but who aren't actually that IRL & would otherwise need to spend ages looking things up for other players' specific cases -- or even questioning that player about the effects if it's a custom condition!), offering ways to manage posting queues -- which is something that has been requested. Another feature we could add, is a concept called "Global LFRP", which is basically turning the existing LFRP system into a "hub" for SL roleplayers to find other RP sims with, and people RPing in them, or find other people RPing in their current sims, complete with friend lists, blacklists, etc. all handled by an external server. Ultimately, expanding the LFRP system in this way, though it would be a daunting task, would help connect roleplayers across sims & help promote a stronger, closer community, especially between sims in the same categories. Players would be allowed to find the genres of sims that they want more easily, without having to trawl the SL search engine, or TP to random RP hubs hoping to find something that they like; expanding the tool in this way would allow them to pick & choose between registered sims of their desired category & easily visit them, hassle-free.
And there's
so much more that's possible!
However!
"This looks like it could be the start of an amazing thing," someone might think. Yes, it could be! But there are obstacles we'll need to overcome to do it. First and foremost, the current RP tool that you're using, it has reached its finishing point. I mentioned this earlier in the post; we hadn't anticipate this popularity! The consequence of this is that the current version of the RP tool you all are using, it is too "hardcoded" to be able to attain any of these things we would like to do. We can't add the functionalities we desire without breaking important features in the tool, and because of that, we will be doing some minor bugfixes to the current RP tool, and then we will leave it alone. We don't want to break it.
The solution?
We've started development of a "PRO" version of the RP tool that's much more optimized & upgrade friendly, and it's currently still in developer testing but it's looking very promising. The PRO RP tool interacts with itself in an entirely different way than the current one, and it works faster & already has more features than the current version. More importantly, it's also completely HUD-independent (unless you want modules). As it is right now, you can operate every feature of it by chat command, without a HUD. This is an important step in our new direction: we realize some of you don't like to depend on HUDs for this and that, or just plain have to many of them attached. Well, you don't need the HUD anymore with the PRO version. You won't ever!
But now we encounter a different problem we didn't have before: funding!
Brrh, that's a
terrible word! You know you won't like it if something that is currently completely free starts talking about
money! Did it just get colder in here?
I've iterated that we want to standardize the RP Tool in the roleplaying community of Second Life, so that it is
the go-to tool for all your RP needs, able to either natively cover your every need, or able to attach a module to do the job. We want, if you'll pardon my French, to make it the
best damn tool on the grid! But we're just a small team of developers, and we do have shortcomings. We are also ordinary people with ordinary jobs, and not terribly much dough to spare. Maintaining the server for the RP Tool costs money, and building an infrastructure able to do what we want it to do is even more costly, and will take time. So now we're at a little bit of an impasse!
We
sincerely need some funding if we're to be able to improve and expand the RP tool, and especially if we end up having to hire more programmers and webdev-heads to accomplish some of that we wish to achieve.
Therefore I wish to ask what your opinions are, as users of the current RP tool! When the PRO version is completed, there are a few ways we can go about releasing it, what kind of model we want for it, etc. The plan right now is to offer it as a paid item on the marketplace in conjunction with the free RP tool, but at the same time I can foresee a lot of frustration emerging from the fact that the free RP tool would basically be in "development stasis", where it's kept alive but no longer being updated -- unless it's extremely important to do so, while the paid version gets all the love. And we would like to continue to offer you a great RP tool for free, but at the same time, we need a more stable source of income to make it even greater!
Oh, and keep in mind that
it's still a long time until the PRO RP Tool is even remotely ready for release, so there's seriously no rush! It won't have the features I've discussed here on release most likely, but it's something we'll be gradually adding over time. Even so, the PRO RP Tool has at least 7-8 months left to go before it might be ready for public use. Maybe even more.
So! I've made this poll, which has the 3 ideas we think are the best listed, but if you have other ideas that could work, you're welcome to vote "Other" & comment on the poll. We always appreciate your feedback & ideas, and we take pride in seriously considering everything! Without you, we wouldn't even be here today at this point where we can discuss the future of the RP Tool and where to go from here. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: You guys are
awesome!You can find the poll here:
http://vote.pollcode.com/57511779Please vote, and you're welcome to leave your comments. They will be read! If you're also a Lismore player with an account here, you can use this topic for comments as well.
Happy roleplaying, folks!
