Gossip RSS feed:

[The Crazy Animal]

I happened to spot soul mentioning time stamping for gossips and it made me think for a second maybe we could just have it log gossips as a RSS feed. We could then pick up the RSS feed via our eventual web page. Although, we could probably also adapt it for use via a news option on the main login page in the game.

We could also do other interesting thing via this medium like:
Game announcements: The barrier between town X and Y has been demolished.
Contest announcements: The wolf-fish fishing contest has started today with the entry of a 34lb wolf-fish caught by <player>.
Boss kills: <player> ended today the rein of the evil king humber jumber the third.
Arrest reports: Sheriff so and so of <town> arrested <player> for <charge> at <time stamp>.
Rare monster locator reports: The citizens of Eldomare reported seeing a large celestial dragon south of their town today.

[ZLemur]

This idea makes me horny. I particularly love the game announcements.

[Vitoc]

I happened to spot soul mentioning time stamping for gossips and it made me think for a second maybe we could just have it log gossips as a RSS feed. We could then pick up the RSS feed via our eventual web page. Although, we could probably also adapt it for use via a news option on the main login page in the game.

We could also do other interesting thing via this medium like:
Game announcements: The barrier between town X and Y has been demolished.
Contest announcements: The wolf-fish fishing contest has started today with the entry of a 34lb wolf-fish caught by <player>.
Boss kills: <player> ended today the rein of the evil king humber jumber the third.
Arrest reports: Sheriff so and so of <town> arrested <player> for <charge> at <time stamp>.
Rare monster locator reports: The citizens of Eldomare reported seeing a large celestial dragon south of their town today.

Consider it high priority on the list of ideas to implement.  We'd have to figure out a system of filtering.  Anyone know how forum software generally keep track of which threads have new unread posts in them on a per user basis?  Seems like the DB size could get really out of hand very quickly, but they must have a decent solution since it's so common.

[The Crazy Animal]

I?m not sure how they do the new post thing but I?m not sure why that would be needed either. Probably something you could ask at one of the open source forum software forums.

I do have a very vague understanding how forum software really goes about making the RSS feeds though. They basically just query the DB using the time stamp field and update those partial records to an xml file that applies to current RSS standards. It?s kind of simple for what it offers and uses the same DB as the messages so it doesn?t take up very much extra space. This actually describes it a little better then I could. Scroll down to: ?Case Study - RSS Generation from a Database?:

http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/rss_primer/

Other thoughts though:

As much as I want to be I?m not fully convinced though that the RSS standards will actually work for exactly what we need now that I?m actually looking at them more closely. I mean I?d love this to be a real time update but I?m not sure how to pull that off. Since it would have to skip the update to xml step and pull the info direct from the DB otherwise you end up with a nice unwanted delay.

Going back to RSS though just incase we don?t or can?t go real time. If this is only going on Greatermud pages then we don?t need to use exact RSS standards as long as we come up with a decent way of generating and reading the xml file. Flash would probably be the best root to go if we deviate from the standards for reading but PHP, Perl or just about any of the scripting languages could do it as well.

Skipping past whatever headers we use.

We only really need a few fields for gossips:

<Item>
<gossip>
      <time></time>
         <player></player>
      <message></message>
   </gossip>
</Item>

For game announcements:

<Item>
   <announcement>   
<time></time>
         <message></message>
   </announcement>
</Item>

Making good messages for the announcements could be a big issue though such as group boss kills and stuff like that could use a little extra thought.

BTW - If we use the separate tags for gossips and announcements we can then further filter them down when they are re-displayed.

As for keeping the DB from getting too big you could just have records expire after X amount of time. Another thing that could be done is have a max record number and have new messages purge the oldest kept gossip still in the DB. We could also look at giving things priority codes so low priority items get removed first.