Reading Books

Kresslack

With the current system you have to specify which page you wish to read, (e.g. read journal page 3, etc). What if a second option was put in to set the book you're reading to the primary one. You'd start by OPENing the book, journal, scroll, manuscript, etc and then READ (BOOK|JOURNAL|MANUSCRIPT) and it would set that to your primary book, so that it wouldn't read any other books or literature in your inventory or the room until you CLOSED BOOK/SCROLL. You start on the very first page to have text, and can then TURN PAGE  and TURN PAGE BACK (TP and TPB) to navigate through the book. It offers a better and more convenient method of simulated reading.

Antonius

Like Targossas' prayer books? No thanks. Those things are fucking awful.

As long as it was completely and utterly optional, and didn't impact the current mechanics of reading journals and such, then go right ahead.

Kresslack

Kresslack said:

Antonius said:

Like Targossas' prayer books? No thanks. Those things are fucking awful.

As long as it was completely and utterly optional, and didn't impact the current mechanics of reading journals and such, then go right ahead.

What if a second option was put in to set the book you're reading to the primary one. 

Nylian

This seems easily scriptable.

Kresslack

The same could be said about a great number of ideas, many of which have been implemented in the past, but that's wholly not the point. I have a simple alias for 'rj <page#>', but that doesn't account for having more than one piece of literature on hand, or the need to specify the next page.

This is simply suggested as an alternative or supplemented method for reading through one item of literature in a more convenient and conventional fashion. 

Lorielan

@Kresslack With the implementation of the positional reference (as per Announce news #4057) a while ago, you should be able to READ JOURNAL#1 to read the first journal in your inventory, and increase that number for each subsequent journal. (This also works for reading letters, probing items, and a few other commands.)

Kresslack

That's interesting and useful. Just would be nice to effectively pursue the pages of the active tome.

Aereidhna

Oops wrong thread. I do dig this idea though.

Fianna

I actually spent a couple hours constructing a system of aliases that functions almost exactly like this, because that's exactly how I expected books to work in the first place! It would be nice to have something like this built in, but it would probably have to be an option in the config, so as not to throw off the people who've been reading the old way for some decade+!

Tael

How about just READ JOURNAL PAGE NEXT?

All it would do is move the bookmark one page forward then open it to the bookmarked page as though you read it without specifying a page.

That way you don't need some way to specify a "primary" book or whatever, bookmarks work relatively similar to how they work in real life allowing you to keep your place as you read through something, and you can read without having to manually change the page number over and over.

(Something like this could be scripted, but this seems like the sort of convenient thing that should probably just be in the game. Manually incremending page counts in the command to continue reading has always been clunky.)

Magenta

It's actually quite bad to have varying ways of reading books, much like @Antonius already mentioned. We have to teach people to read "normal" journals/manuscripts with the READ JOURNAL PAGE <#>, and then you have to explain to people how to actually read the Targossian breviary or the Adherent's handbook, which function differently. It's confusing to people, especially to real newbies. And with the current retirement masses streaming in, it feels like there's quite a handful of those from the other IRE games.

I really, really love the idea @Kresslack suggested in the first place. But only if it replaces ALL book reading we currently have. I think it would make things easier both for newbies and the people that have the patience to explain everything to them.