today's idea: bikes!

[Willow]

Originally posted by Oliver White:
Bikes are cool. Bikes are expensive. No one rides bikes anywhere. While bugging Hecate to increase the bike rack capacity so Ollie could move his stuff to his new apartment in a reasonable number of trips, this idea came upon me...

Here's today's idea: Put more bike racks around campus & town, outside the gym, library, dorms, cafe, restaurants, apartments, you name it. Code the racks so that only the person who put the bike in the rack can get the bike out. That way people can ride bikes places and not have to worry about losing them. They're $30!!

Also bikes aren't any faster than walking. I'd suggest that the @sneak property that bypasses the glance text for a room be applied to bikes. As it is you can @sneak across town about twice as fast as a person can walk; bikes should have this property (while sneak should take twice as long to go anywhere as someone walking).

So that's today's idea to make bikes more frequently used. (Ollie really likes

Thomas King seconded that idea
Demitri esquire reminded us all to use bikes responsibly

Hotaru suggested:
it would be cool if you could 'ride my bike to cafe' and then get a shorter message than having to move 20 rooms or something. Might make the 30$ more worthwhile

Oliver White finished with:
I like this. Make the bike racks like teleportation stations, with their own unique names (like Cafe, Dantes, etc.) Then it's just a matter of @ride to 'Cafe. And voila you're there after a much shorter interval than if you manually moved the distance. So you can still RP going from A to B manually if you want, but if you're in a hurry, then there's the @ride. A command such as this would be nice if the north side of town ever opened up. That's going to be a long walk...

I don't know how the rooms are set up, but it would be easy to establish a distance between each bike rack and have a somewhat accurate timing system (although if you @rode from a non bike station room, how that time would be calculated would be difficult).

And, Clover, I didn't think you were considering stealing Ollie's bike; you just caught me in the middle of bug testing. Don't @sneak and mount a bike. It does very odd things (like leave your bike in the starting room.)

and thanks to Clover for not stealing Ollie's bike. :)

[Oliver White]

This is an idea that already has been implemented! At least the Bike Rack part. As I recall, there are bike racks (although they aren't visible in room descriptions) outside the library, cafe, some of the shops on Main street, the apartment buildings, and in a few other places.

Ollie rides his bike quite frequently now. :)

[Willow]

Is the speed of riding a bike still something that should be improved upon (as in sped up)?

The bike itself is utilizing a special code library in order to ride it and it stay with you as you move, but it not exactly being in your inventory...it's like having proximity to something (on the bike) and it going with you when you move.

So I'm uncertain if this could be modified further to teleport sorta to a destination like the boat does or not. Once possibility is that one would have to slow ride a bike like you do now to a destination, then you 'save' that destination in your bike and then you could 'quick' ride to it in the future from anywhere in game.

Again, don't know if that's possible, but want to check if it is still wanted or not.

Willow :eek:

[Oliver White]

If it's possible, I would like it. But I don't really see anyone else riding their bike all that often. I think it's far down the list of things to be implemented. But if the north side of Arkham is slated to open within a year or so, moving back and forth quickly, on bike, would be real nice. (Or if bikes aren't modifiable in that way, get the trolley running to zip you over there.)