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Originally Posted by rob
There are two big gotchas with letting users pick and choose their own colors. First of all, once content can be shared, colors will have different meanings across different content. So the only way this works is for us to have an official list of purposes for pins and then let users assign different colors to those purposes. That way, a pin of purpose X will always use the same color for UserA regardless of what colors was used by the publisher of the content. Of course, this means that we have figure and dictate the official set of purposes, and I don't expect we'll be able to satisfy everyone's different desires with anything we come up with.
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I think a map Legend would cover this as others have stated already. Set your map legend in the Mechanics somehow and then when placing a pin, when you link to a topic the pin color would match that topic's color as defined in the Mechanics by the Legend. ie. Communities get Red, Geographical regions Blue, etc. If it isn't set in the Mechanics and tied to the legend, then the pin is just the generic red that is now.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rob
This also introduces a new complication, though. Let's say you have a player in your game and that player is also in a game with another GM. You decide to use red pins to mean PurposeX and blue pins to mean PurposeY. However, the other GM chooses just the opposite mappings. Now the player is completely confused as he moves between one GM and the other. The only way to solve that is to now require players to also pick their own color-coding for each of the different purposes. This makes life more complicated for players and will ultimately result in some players not bothering and deciding they won't even bother with using Realm Works due to it being confusing for them.
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I don't see that being much of an issue. I put that in the same boat as knowing what each GM's house rules are, and if the legend is in place there is also a reference for the player to use to alleviate the confusion.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rob
Now we've shot ourselves in the foot in the pursuit of making things flexible. That's not good. Therefore, based on the above complications, this is something that we need to figure out a better solution for before we can implement anything. Lacking some brilliant idea that solves this problem, this is something that won't be on the upcoming survey. If any of you have ideas along these lines, please share them. Once we have a good solution, we can put that solution squarely on the todo list.
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Are the smart images being used for anything other than maps? I'm sure they may be, but the majority of users will be using them for maps, which lends itself to having a legend.
While that is the simple answer for us as users, I won't even begin to speculate on the difficulty of how you would begin to implement that on your side of things Rob.
Not having dug too deeply into the customization of the tags and what not in my own realms, I am not speaking from personal experience, but from what I've seen in the tutorials and from lurking around the forums it seems that it would be ideal for the users to be able to set the colors of a pin with either a Mechanic entry or in the same manner in which they set up a new tag. That would then correlate to the legend on the map.