I’m looking for information on how to implement FL-like skills within my own StoryNexus games. That is, skills with levels, progress indicators, and the ability to augment and display progress bars for gradual advancement within a skill, without necessarily having the level increase a by a full level each time. I’m seeing a bit of information about progress bar displays in the Objectives section of the StoryNexus Reference Guide - or at least something that gets me closer to implementing that effect, but it doesn’t seem to give enough information to implement skill levels, or the progress bars for skills off on the left. Is there somewhere where how to affect this is documented, and if there isn’t… could there be please? Thanks!
The quality type you’re looking for is “basic ability”. That works in exactly the same way as FL’s skills in terms of change points and difficulty tests, but unfortunately they chose not to implement the increasing status bar effect. I don’t think there’s any way to do that yourself. The “objective” quality type will give you the bar, but not the automatic increases when the quality is tested, etc.
Yes, those evidently-non-implementable bits of niftiness are what I was getting at. If Fallen London can implement them, they’re presumably possible - we’d either need to know how to implement them, or there’s functionality that FL has which we don’t currently have access to. I’m hoping someone on FL staff can respond with either how to achieve the effect, or a note as to when or whether it will be something our SN games can do as well. SInce FL is a major user draw to SN - it brought me to it - as a showcase of SN’s functionality, it’s a little daunting to start designing a game world only to find that some of those effects are unachievable, and may never be. Tabs are another good instance of this situation: FL’s various tabs for Story, Message, Market, Nex and so on.
It’s reasonable to infer that with SN in Beta, effects implemented in FL would be possible with other SN creations if they’re not currently. Why waste the additional functionality if it’s already been coded? =)
There’s quite a lot that FL can do that SN can’t I’m afraid - mostly to do with the interface - and as you’ve probably seen elsewhere by now, that’s the way it’s going to stay, at least for a long while. The code bases aren’t quite the same, as far as I understand it, as FL actually pre-dates the public version of SN.
I was gutted when the announcement first came out, as I had just bitten the bullet and started working on a major project in it. After some reflection, however, I realised that it was pretty much academic. Although there are some FL features that it would be nice to have, SN is still a seriously powerful tool, and there’s no reason that a project built with it can’t be as successful as FL itself. Although that, of course, is assuming you’re willing to nurture it over the long term and market it hard.[li]