Life is Feudal Official Forum

[Seppuku]

I would love a system similar to Ultima Online where you can write in books, and save your writings. This was such an amazing feature that few games seem to bother with these days.

[Thurgeis]

This would be amazing and could lead to many variations of player driven lore!

[Thokan]

I am all for the mechanic to format text into the game on in-game objects or whatever. I love the runestones in Haven and Hearth and usually spend half my time boating around writing poetry here and there.

It is a simple mechanic to implement but would give so much back to the player.

[Shealladh]

Writing would be cool, especially if used as messages you could send between guilds via a horse messenger

Some basic ideas and how they were made;

Binding medium An ingredient on paint or ink that binds pigment and makes it adhere to the surface to be embellished. Clarified egg white (glair) was the principal binding medium used in manuscript illumination. Gum (such as gum arabic from the acacia) glue (such as ichthyocollon, a fish glue, casein, a dairy-product glue, and gelatin, made from the parchment offcuts) were also used for this purpose as well as for gilding.

Ink. The word derives from Latin encaustum ("burnt in"), since the gallic and tannic acids in ink and the oxidation of its ingredients cause it to eat into the writing surface. The basis of medieval ink was a solution of gall (from gallnuts) and gum, coloured by the addition of carbon (lampblack) and/or iron salts. The ferrous ink produced by iron salts sometimes faded to a red-brown or yellow. Copper salts were occasionally used too, sometimes fading to grey-green. Ink was used for drawing and ruling as well as for writing and, when diluted, could be applied with a brush as a wash.

Parchment A writing support material that derives its name from Pergamon (Bergama in modern Turkey), an early production centre. The term is often used generically to denote animal skin prepared to receive writing, although it is more correctly applied only to sheep and goat skin, with the term vellum reserved for calf skin. Uterine vellum, the skin of stillborn or very young calves, is characterised by its small size and particularly fine, white appearance; however, it was rarely used. To produce parchment or vellum, the animal skins were defleshed in a bath of lime, stretched on a frame, and scraped with a lunellum while damp. They could then be treated with pumice, whitened with a substance such as chalk, and cut to size. Differences in preparation technique seem to have occasioned greater diversity in appearance than did the type of skin used. Parchment supplanted papyrus as the most popular writing support material in the fourth century, although it was known earlier. Parchment was itself largely replaced by paper in the sixteenth century (with the rise of printing), but remained in use for certain high-grade books. See also flesh side and hair side.

Pigment The colouring agent in paint. The paints used in illumination consist of vegetable, mineral, and animal extracts, ground or soaked out and mixed with glair as a binding medium, perhaps, with some glue and water added. Other additives were also used, including stale urine, honey, and ear wax, to modify colour, texture and opacity; inert whites such as chalk, eggshell, or white lead were added to increase opacity. Some pigments were obtained locally (such as turnsole, or crozophora tinctoria); others were exotic imports (such as ultramarine, made from lapis lazuli imported from Persia or Afghanistan). During the early Middle Ages, scribes and/or illuminators ground and prepared their own pigments, perhaps, with the aid of an assistant, but with the growth of specialised, more commercial production around 1200, they often purchased their ingredients in prepared form from a stationer or an apothecary. With the rise of experimental science and international trade in the fourteenth century, many colours were added to the traditional palette, which significantly affected styles of illumination. The production of synthetically manufactured pigments (such as mercury-based vermilion and copper blues) and imports (such as saffron yellow from crocus stamens and red flakes from Brazil woods largely imported from Ceylon) increased at this time. Pigments are difficult to identify precisely without chemical analysis, although other techniques of analysis, such as radiospectroscopy and X-ray fluorescence, as well as reconstructions from medieval recipes, are advancing rapidly. Some pigments also change in a consistent fashion over time: for example, the red lead often used for rubrics frequently fades and turns silver-black through oxidation, and copper-based verdigris green sometimes eats through the support as it corrodes.

Vellum The word has the same origin as veal or veau in French (calf, vitellus in Latin), and is strictly the writing material made from cow skin.

That said, Writ's would be possible, gain audience with local lord and get a seal added to it making it official.

Suggested Uses: Battle Orders/Maps, Deeds of ownership, Reward Posters, Plea's (asking for assistance), Journals, in game Books (various, from recipes to How-To's), etc.

Best would be each combat unit under a commander would have to have orders drawn up and send to other commanders, even so far as to siege tactics.

Would be a nice reward after getting these sorts of things after raids, if you're into things like that. You could duplicate things, but then you should have a chance of "unknown" failure and the recipient would not know until failure in recipes (for example) start to happen.

Anyways, my contribution...

[Vallras]

I would love to document my entire experience in the game, and when someone takes it they can read my story/journey before they killed me haha.

[Sting5]

Nice suggestion! We could have stories of clans written in the game, books with recipes - and that could be 100% player created content! I always felt sorry for Elder Scrolls series game makers, who had to write contents of books... Because nobody really bothers to read them.

[Rrashintoast]

Books are a great idea, and can play a very important role in the game.

I hope they are implemented, maybe make it so your Intelligence has to be a certain level to read them?

This is one of my personal favorite suggestions, so I really hope they make it in.

[Ubaciosamse]

My suggestion
http://lifeisfeudal.com/Discussions/que ... pher-skill
And there Rrashintoast's suggestion also!
http://lifeisfeudal.com/Discussions/question/books

And besides Toast is a hardcore UO fan

[Azzerhoden]

Thanks Uba! Folks should really spend some time browsing the voting page. Someone in a different post asked why the dev team was working on player voted ideas. Made me laugh.

(1) They are working on it because different developers work on different things.

(2) Because a large chunk of the player population thought the ideas were important enough to vote in favor on them!

[Heinrich_von_Leipa]

I'd love that entire thing in the game... Imagine how for instance you would first have to learn to read and write as a new general skill. And it would also be a great opportunity for another "Mentor" Skill, that monks (people with monk robe as "tool" + a min. piety skill level) can teach at churchs / monasteries (been asked so often and for sure church buildings will become part of the game in future as well). That would be hilarious!

[Heinrich_von_Leipa]

A simple and great initial approach to this entire idea (probably even moddable by a good modder, right Basil? :P ) I can imagine, is this:

---------------------------------------------------------------------

::: Paper & Parchment
As we all know, during the Ancient time and Middle-Ages, not only paper was used but also parchment (leather). Now since Paper was known at various areas (e.g. Asia) already while others still used parchment (e.g. Europe), and LiF does not resemble a particular time or area, I suggest to go down the simple way at first and focus only on introducing paper, excluding parchment. Since my post here shall show a simple way to initially introduce paper and books, I will work with flax paper only, no parchment.

::: General Idea
Differenciate between sheets of papers and books. A book is obviously manufactured from sheets of papers. The difference would be that a book can hold much more text than a single sheet of paper but is more complex to make.
Book-wise I can imagine 2 different book types: Simple books, where anyone owning it can write in (so can be manipulated) and decorated books with a simple lock (creator writes in and locks it then, so it's read only for others).



::: Making sheets of papers & books:
- To make a sheet of paper you need at least level 30 of "Arts" skill. - You boil flax stem into flax fiber like we already do now.
- The extracted flax fiber can now be dropped back into the tanning tub with water and after 30 minutes it can be extracted into wet paper (could even have to attach a new tool, a wooden sieve, for it)
- Now you hang the wet paper sheets on a drying rack - let's say up to 10 sheets per rack at once. Just like with furs, after 1 hour of drying you can take it off and have finished sheets of paper.




- To make a simple book you have to assemble 2 thin leather, 10 bone glue and 50 sheets of paper via the jewlery kit. The skill needed could be the "Arts" skill, from level 60 up.

- To make a decorated, locked, book you need at least "Arts" skill level 90. To assemble one with the jewelery kit, you need to collect 4 thin leather, 20 bone glue, 100 sheets of paper, one lock, 1 metal band and 5 of any gem type.




::: Using sheets of papers & books:
I imagine that to actually read and write a book or piece of paper, you double click it like a backpack and get a similar popup window where you can either write in or, if it's a locked book, read the text. If you lack of the skill to read and write, then nothing happens on double click, since the right click menu does not give the option of the "Read & Write" Skill tree.





-----------------------------------------------
Note to the end: Obviously in order to write you also need ink and a writing feather. I have typed enough, however, so I will leave the ideas on that to someone else :-)

[Heinrich_von_Leipa]

One more additional idea: Also I could then very well imagine a craftable book shelf, like the armor stand and alike, where we could then drop all our papers and books in our home and create some sort of library!

[Custodian]

A simple and great initial approach to this entire idea (probably even moddable by a good modder, right Basil? P )

Indeed. Awesome and neat concept for the mod.

[RetroLogi]

The mod has been abandoned?
if not, tell us a prediction of what will be available pls.

I am available to test