[crossfire] Character names, was Re: Changing connection texts

[Mark Wedel]

Nicolas Weeger wrote:
> Hello.
> 
>>   One thing I did think of might be DM access - maybe the dm_file should
>> use account name instead of/in addition to character name?
>>
>>   It strikes me that if you are going to trust a player with dm access, you
>> probably don't really care what character they are playing.
> 
> Yes, makes sense.

  Looking at the code, something vaguely related here is character naming standards.

  Right now, character names are limited to letters and - or _, and the - or _ 
can not be the first letter.

  Spaces and numbers are not allowed.  I can certainly understand spaces, as on 
unixlike systems, spaces in file names are a pain to deal with.  But not sure 
why restrictions on numbers (like the - or _, I could perhaps see why we 
wouldn't want a character to start with number.

  But why shouldn't Mark99 be allowed?

  The other oddity (IMO) is that names are case sensitive.  Thus, Mark and mark 
are 2 different characters.  That to me isn't great.  If I was adventuring with 
a person, I might remember their name, but probably wouldn't remember the 
details on its capitalization - it could be odd to find out the 'dave' I'm not 
adventuring with is not the same player as the 'Dave' I adventure with last week.

  So my suggestions on this:
- Allow numbers in names - just the name can not start with a number.
- Going forward, names should be unique in a case insensitive manner.  The 
player can still choose variations on capitalization, you just can't have a 
'mark' and 'Mark'.

  To handle that last one, simplest thing is to just store all character related 
files in a lower case version of the name (so Mark would be stored as 
mark/mark.pl for example).  That's easy to do and solves the problem.

  The thing that is harder to solve is existing player files.  Writing a script 
to rename them is straightforward.  The hard part is dealing with any names that 
conflict (eg, server has existing Mark and mark).


> 
> 
> Nicolas
> 
> 
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