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

[Nicolas Weeger]

>   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?


Ok by me to allow numbers.



>   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.


Well, could make sense too, yes.



>   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).


Unless I'm mistaking, there is no 1.x => 2.0 migration script for players, 
meaning people will have to restart their character.
So name collision issues shouldn't matter.




Nicolas
-- 
http://nicolas.weeger.org [Mon p'tit coin du web]
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