We've launched the announced Talent and Lore Update! All characters are granted one free RP talent and race change. Update Log.
Updates to Talents and Monsters: Read the specifics in the Update Log
08/01/'21
Gaia Reborn
Gaia Reborn, the hottest MMORPG of the last decade, has seen millions of players experience its unique world - a combination of fantasy and reality. When Gaia Reborn was a game, one goal was to make the game world a one-half scale model of the real world. This pursuit was known as the Half-Gaia Project, and it is one of the aspects which led to Gaia Reborn becoming such a popular virtual world. With regional servers having unique areas, quests, cities, and monsters, it wasn't uncommon for people to create alternate characters on other servers to experience what felt like an entirely new game.
Ten years after the game's launch, millions of players have joined and created countless characters across the many servers. Now, with the release of the latest expansion, Pioneers of Arcadia, many are getting ready to begin new adventures in the new Italian server, exploring the new region corresponding to Italy, known in Gaia as Italia. Characters would have to start from fresh in this new world, but Italy would finally get its own piece of this world.
Countless players created their characters, logged in with excitement fueling their hands as the cursor swept across the screen, and then... darkness... Everything was black, and as their eyes opened, the players found themselves in the streets of an unfamiliar city. Looking around to survey their surroundings, many players realized this city was not so new after all. While desolate and ruined, the architecture conquered by vines and greenery, this city was unmistakably Rome, but at the same time, it was not. Finding themselves in the bodies of their characters, trapped in the world of Gaia Reborn, players are left to adapt to their new reality in this fantasy world.
As per his routine. Anomaly slowly gets up from bed, panicking, falling, but this time, twists his wrist painfully, jolting him fully awake and forcing the realisations of where and how into his head immediately rather than having them slowly come back to him as he wakes up. While shaking the pain out of his wrist he looks over his current resources, including the level 0 items he’d grabbed to try to piece together something he’d wanted to try for a while now. Power tools…
He knew that, in all likelihood this wasn’t going to be quite as easy as he’d like it to be, but it didn’t matter. He hunkered down in his accommodations and began working. Using some old scrap paper he’d found alongside charcoal to sketch out the basic design of an engine, he got to thinking… what would be the best method to power this? Fire mana would allow him to create an engine that he could pump mana into in order to make it run, but that’d wear with time unless he made it a decently high quality, wouldn't it? Plus, combustion engines required quite a lot of precise engineering to not blow up in your face…as those thoughts compound in his head, he realizes. Since he doesn't have to deal with generating the power, he could just use an electric motor, and power it with lightning magic, which, should in theory work. I mean, hell. Magnets exist, and electricity has been proven to function, so what if he made an electric mana conductive cable and made an electric motor? Of course, with no method to test the motor designs, materials or anything along those lines, he begins preparing.
In order to prepare to make at least a workable power tool he got down to designing the internals, ignoring where the rotational energy was coming from for the first part of this design, he decided that making it function off durable gears would likely be the best and easiest option for his current situation, which was perfect, since outside of those heavy workloads he expected, he could just use the old, outdated and unmaintained scrap parts he’d found to make the test pieces.
Putting the gearbox together was irritating, having to bend and file old metal into the correct shape for gears to run smoothly was irritating but at least after an hour or two, it did manage to take the correct shape. Running smoothly enough for him not to complain about it too much. Though with the rust flaking off the old gears, there was no doubt it was going to be less efficient than the final product.
At the back of the mechanism, following what little he knew about rock drills, and more what he knew about engineering in general, he added a spring, to the back just behind the front portion, that way, you could potentially push it harder against the rock you were drilling in order to maintain constant drilling speed and pressure.
With the rough wood that he’d found lying about, the sort of wood that has no use other than creating design mockups, he continued on further, creating a shell for the drill mechanisms. Trying to balance form and function. Giving it a side and back handle for ease of drilling, making sure to leave a slot for the mana battery that he’d eventually have made in order to more consistently fuel the magical power tool without having to actively drain his mana while he was out in the woods in order to power the power tool.
So, now this, was going to be the hard part… or, extremely difficult part even. From what he knew, magic was transformed into its final form through intent, but cold metal didn’t have any will to will the magic from one form to another… but maybe he could pass on his intent into the metal? Sure, it’d be mana intensive, since he’d have to be constantly running his mana through the materials as thoroughly as he can as he forges it into the final product…
Attempting to do this on a small scale at least for the initial test, he shortens his staff by a small bit, taking a part of it off and intertwining it with some copper wire from the scraps, gradually heating it up as he passes more and more air mana through the test piece of material. Forcing his intent closer to electricity the longer it goes, stopping just before the wood starts to burn as the copper fuses itself to the wood he continues cooling it, maintaining the height of his mana output as it cools down…
After a few more moments of cooling, he picks it up, of course, being an improper test piece made of wood fused to copper, he didn’t try to bend it like you would a normal copper cable, instead, he began running mana through it, and, although more inefficient than running mana with intent through the air mana conductive material, electricity sparked and arched from the end, before eventually creating aloud zapping POP as the wood splits apart, the electrical output getting too high and shocking his hand. An eventuality when it came to working with electricity when you had no insulative gloves, he supposed.
Word count: 286
Last Edit: Mar 28, 2023 5:37:42 GMT by Anomaly: Doing a rework of pt2, and separating the specialty mana conductive metal from the motor for potential future uses
Now that he had his resources designed, he began sketching out the mana motor that the whole mechanism would be running on, it was large and bulky. Probably weighing 30lbs on its own. Which was going to make the whole rock drill weight about 50… not too bad, but it definitely wasnt going to be something you’d want to carry around for more than the time necessary, especially with how the lack of vibration absorbing materials was bound to hurt your joints as it drilled.
Though, he continued working, running the connection points up to the back handle, where there was an inset coil of copper. With a slot for the conductive alloy to be fused in place. This way he wouldn’t have to spare too much air mana conductive materials for the alloyed material in order to power the powertool. And, with the relative proximity to the users hands, it should hopefully reduce how far the mana has to travel in order to begin creating mana, which, furthermore, should help reduce the waste mana and electricity.
He didn’t add an emergency stop to the tool, since there was no reason to, after all, power could be cut off by just cutting off your mana supplying the tool. Making it relatively safe in comparison to real world rock drills, which if you had any clothes get caught in the rapidly spinning drill, you’d likely end up with a broken limb.
With the test pieces of copper that he had, he’d slowly wrapped the coils around old, rusted gears, creating a very simple electrical motor out of the coils of copper that he had, though it was no more than the size of a coin thanks to the relative scarcity of even low quality copper wire.
Running mana with intent through it, he saw as the motor ran. It was exactly what he’d expected, but he was doubting weather a motor made with this technique would even turn out as a level one item, which would be admittedly embarrassing. An engineer making powertools, only to have them turn out being worse than a half broken rusty pickaxe.
“Well, there’s no way to tell how good it’ll be until i actually try to finalize the recipes… so i guess i should og buy all of the materials i'm going to need in order to actually make this then, huh? Though, i'm going to have to mine for some air mana conductive minerals. Since i don’t think there are any for sale…”
Welcome to the help dialog for the Custom Mini-Profile Creator plugin!
Click on any of the tabs above to go through the plugin configuration process!
You can access this menu at any time by clicking on the icon in the bottom right bar (may not be applicable if you're on Forums.net), or you can disable the welcome window and/or the icon by going to Plugins > Manage > Custom Mini-Profile Creator and changing the Show Help option.
This step is essential as it gives the plugin everything it needs on the page to get as much profile information as possible.
To make the profile variables work you'll need to add a new line to the very end of Themes > Layout Templates > Mini-Profile and paste the code below on it. The code should be placed completely outside of the mini-profile, so if you're using the default mini-profile template this will be after the very last closing </div> tag. This needs to be done on every theme you have the plugin enabled on as the template is theme-specific.
If your mini-profile template is already customized and you've hit the variable limit for your template you're free to remove any lines from the code below if they contain information that you don't plan on using. For example, if you have no plans to ever add a user's IP to their mini-profile for staff reference you can remove <div class="mp-info ip">$[user.ip]</div> from the code and everything else will still work just fine.
Once you've added the HTML from the Layout Templates tab you're ready to move on to building your mini-profiles. If you want to get going and try some out now or you're not very adept at HTML, CSS, or Javascript, worry not! This plugin includes some examples for you to try out. You're free to skip to the Custom Profile Fields tab and read over this tab later when you're ready to build your own.
Here's a quick rundown of each of the components in Plugins > Manage > Custom Mini-Profile Creator:
Name This is the name you'll be adding to your custom profile field dropdown once you've finished coding the mini-profile. Pretty self-explanatory. Make sure this name is unique from every other name you use for your mini-profiles or you'll end up overwriting the earlier ones in the list.
HTML This is the HTML that will go inside your mini-profile. You can use just about any HTML tag here so long as it's appropriate for where the mini-profile is showing on the page. Please refrain from using <style> or <script> tags here. You have the next two sections for that! Also, remember that mini-profiles can show multiple times on the same page, so you shouldn't add ID attributes to any of your elements here. Two elements on the same page cannot have the same ID per HTML standards.
CSS This is where you'll place what would normally go in your forum's style sheet or what would normally be between <style> tags. Try to code your mini-profile's HTML in a way that will allow you to target it specifically with your selectors. For example, you can surround all of the content in your HTML with a <div> element with a class and target that class and its child elements specifically with your CSS. That way you don't accidentally target every mini-profile on the page with CSS that was meant for the one you're building. One more thing: The forum theme's CSS still applies beforehand, so your mini-profile may look right in one theme but not in another. The best way to circumvent this is to define as many styles as you can to override the theme's CSS.
Javascript Anything that normally goes between <script> tags will go here. This one's a bit tricky since you'll obviously want to target the custom mini-profile specifically. Luckily there's an easy way to do that. In your statements you can use the $(this) variable to target the mini-profile if you're coding using jQuery. Otherwise, if you only plan on using standard Javascript you can target $(this)[0] instead.
Once you've finished building your mini-profiles it's finally time to add them to the Edit Profile page for use! To enable selection of custom mini-profiles you'll first need to add two specific custom profile fields in Members > Custom Profile Fields in your forum's admin area:
Mini-Profile Theme
Staff Mini-Profile Theme
Mini-Profile Theme is for mini-profiles that are designed for member use. You can set the Who Can Edit option for this field to Staff With Power if you only want staff to be able to choose mini-profiles for users. Otherwise, if you want members to freely be able to choose their own mini-profiles you can choose Members and Staff With Power.
Staff Mini-Profile Theme is for mini-profiles designed specifically for staff use. This field is completely optional.
Set the type for both of these fields as Drop Down Selection. Click on the (View/Edit) link to add mini-profile names to each of these fields.
If you've just installed this plugin you should have three different mini-profiles already installed by default: Example 1, Example 2, and Example 3. You can add these to your dropdowns to test them out and see the plugin in action.
If you're having trouble getting this plugin to work despite following the instructions in the previous tabs you may want to check that each of your themes meets the prerequisites below in Themes > Layout Templates > Mini-Profile.
First, ensure that opening tag of your mini-profile template includes the $[miniprofile_class] variable in its class. On the default ProBoards theme it should look something like this:
<div class="$[miniprofile_class]">
Next, make sure that the default {foreach} loop for custom fields is present inside your mini-profile. It doesn't need to be visible, so you're free to add it inside a hidden element if you don't plan on displaying it or if it would mess up the appearance of your own custom template.
Beyond that you can do whatever you like to the mini-profile template for the most part and it shouldn't negatively impact the plugin.
The following is a list of available variables for use in the HTML section of the mini-profile creator and their definitions. Adding any of these to a mini-profile will generate the content described in its definition in place of the variable so long as the information that variable outputs is visible to you.
To reference your forum's custom profile fields you can use $[user.customfieldname], substituting "customfieldname" with your custom field's name. You'll need to type the name in all lowercase with no spaces and only use characters A-Z and 0-9.
For example, Mini-Profile Theme becomes $[user.miniprofiletheme]. This will output the value of the custom field. In the case of this example, it'll be the name of the mini-profile theme you've chosen in your profile.
IMPORTANT NOTE: These will only work if you followed the steps in the Installation tab of this window on each of your themes. Any themes that do not include the template code specified there will not have these variables replaced in the mini-profile.
$[user]
User's display name link.
$[user.age]
User's age (if visible to you).
$[user.avatar]
User's current avatar.
$[user.badges]
User's list of badges.
$[user.birthday]
User's date of birth (if visible to you).
$[user.color]
Hex color of user's group. If user is not in a group this will return inherit.
$[user.custom_title]
User's custom title.
$[user.email]
User's email (if visible to you).
$[user.gender.image]
Image associated with the gender selected in the user's profile (if available).
$[user.gender.text]
Name of gender selected in the user's profile (if available).
$[user.group.name]
Name of user's current display group.
$[user.group.stars]
Star images associated with user's current display group.
$[user.id]
User's numerical ID.
$[user.instant_messenger]
User's list of instant messengers specified in their profile (if available).
$[user.invisible]
Returns 1 if a user is invisible. More useful for Javascript.
$[user.ip]
User's IP address (if visible to you).
$[user.is_online]
Returns Member is Online if user is currently online.
$[user.is_staff]
Returns 1 if a user is designated as staff. More useful for Javascript.
$[user.last_online]
Timestamp showing when user was last online.
$[user.likes]
Number of likes this user's posts have received.
$[user.location]
Location specified in user's profile.
$[user.name]
User's display name in plain text.
$[user.personal_text]
User's most recent status.
$[user.posts]
User's post count.
$[user.rank.name]
User's current posting rank.
$[user.rank.stars]
Star images associated with user's current posting rank.
$[user.registered_on]
Timestamp showing the date/time the user registered on the forum.
$[user.registered_on_short]
Condensed version of user's registration date.
$[user.social_network]
User's list of social networks specified in their profile (if available).
$[user.username]
Outputs the user's login username in plain text.
$[user.warning.bar]
User's warning bar (if it exists).
$[user.warning.level]
User's current warning level (if visible to you).
$[user.website]
Website specified in user's profile.
You can utilize the $(this) variable in the Javascript component to target the mini-profile <div> element. For example, if you wanted to add a class to the mini-profile you can use:
$(this).addClass('class-name-here');
Profile variables can also be used in the Javascript component in this plugin. In Javascript the value undefined is used to signify that a value doesn't exist for the variable you've specified. With this in mind you can use profile variables in Javascript conditional statements within the plugin similar to how they're used in the actual layout templates section of the admin area.
if(variable) will only run if the variable you specify has a value.
if(!variable) will only run if the variable you specify has no value.
Example 1 (variable has value):
if(user.group){
$(this).find('.group').show();
}
If the user has their group displayed in their profile the above Javascript would make the HTML below visible if you had it hidden with CSS.