Seeing as how we all have different idea on what portals should connect where (see the DB?s thread asking for ideas), I thought I would attempt to come up with a suggestion for player created portals. In this first post, I will discuss design concepts behind the design and in the second post I will detail the proposal (as much as I can).
Design Rule #1 : Minimize Tulga work to implement idea. Otherwise we will be waiting until next century too see it. After all this would be new work on top of their already full plates. Its needs to be relatively easy to implement, and fairly useful to the overall populace, otherwise it will go nowhere.
Assumption #1 : Portals are stored as database records, including assigned destinations. If they are hard coded tables in the code, this entire idea is out the window, as they would not be player changeable.
With these 2 thoughts in place, the following is added
1) Creating a new Portal should be hard : These should be community projects to create. The more possible destinations, the harder the job to create the portal. One nice side effect of this could be a source of new community construction projects. 2) No Dial-A-Portals : As much as some players might really like them, limited destination portal networks are clearly part of the basic game design. Being able to quickly adjust portals to different destination would clearly break with that design. 3) No Player Pads : Portals, as a start point, need not cross-reference anything else. Pads, as destinations, have to cross-reference to potentially all portals, especially when assigning destinations to new portals. This implies significant developer work. Also there are two security issues. The first is that pads on plot would allow bypassing plot permission, unless the developers spent time reworking the portal teleport code to check permissions on pads (violation of Design Rule #1). If we had player pads, people would start screaming about it rather rapidly. Secondly, since pads would have to have identifiers, most likely player designated, how long would it be before some ?cute? player created a pad named ?Mahegra? (easy solution, preface all Player Pads with fixed Prefix like ?Player?). Still this is more possible problem requiring developer interaction.