Welcome to the USS Highlander

Latest News Items

New Crew!

Posted on Tue Feb 13th, 2018 @ 7:31pm by Captain Tim Williams in Sim Announcement

Everyone,

I'd like to take a minute to welcome the first new crewmember on the Highlander in 2018 - Chris, playing Rosaleen O'Donnell, our new assistant chief operations officer!

The character of Rosaleen is an interesting one (aside from the unusual species and related abilities), so I do encourage you to set aside some time to read the biography. And of course, give Chris your usual warm welcome to the crew!


Matt
AKA Captain Tim Williams

New Year, Fresh Push

Posted on Tue Jan 2nd, 2018 @ 7:41pm by Captain Tim Williams in Out of Character

Hi everyone

I hope you all had a good festive/new year season!

I know that things have been very slow around here for the last couple of months of 2017, and I apologise for that - those months were quite busy for me, so I wasn't left with much time to get online and do any writing.

This year should hopefully see a change to that; I started a new job today which has me off my old shift pattern and onto a more normal Monday to Friday pattern, which means I should hopefully have more time available to give the sim and you the attention deserved. I'll be going through and catching up with the tags I've got hanging waiting for me soon, and start off some new ones to push our plotline along too, so keep an eye out for things coming your way.

Matt
AKA
Captain Williams

Awards!

Posted on Wed Nov 1st, 2017 @ 2:46am by Captain Tim Williams in General News

Hey everyone

So, it's been quite a while since we've done regular awards here, and I want to try and revive that a bit. They're a good way to reward players for the work you do on the sim and get your achievements recognised, and so towards the end of the month I've been considering who to hand what awards out to. First of all, I'm going to be handing out the latest Longevity award that everyone is eligible for, to bring us up to date on that score. Honestly in some cases it doesn't feel like it's been as long as it has, but here's the list of Longevity award recipients:

5yr: Tim Williams
3yr: Melony Taylor
1yr: Rikka Takanashi, Ryan North, Jean Reynard, Griffen Tanol, Vex Krylore
9Mth: Jonathan Forrest
6Mtn: Kevin Barnaby, Jordan Cassidy

I'll make sure to keep on top of milestones as we go from here on in, so expect to see more being handed out as people hit the various marks.

And now onto awards that aren't just a maths game:

The Newcomer award is being granted to our new diplomatic officer, Esmé Dumont, played by Josh. Although Josh has only been with us for a short time, both the XO and I have been thoroughly impressed with their writing so far, and we're looking forward to writing more posts with the character. Keep up the good work!

The Post Master award is for those on the sim who have contributed the most posts for the month, and this time round it is a joint award to both our XO, Vincent Holt (aka Kyle) and Esmé Dumont, who each contributed to four posts this month - double the minimum asked for by the fleet!

Next up is the Captain's Merit award, which this month I am awarding to our quartermaster, Jordan Cassidy, played by Andrea. I was very impressed by Andrea's suggestion in our Discord channel to work with other sims in the task force and have some interaction with the IC quartermaster of those sims to build on the sense of being far from supply lines in the Federation where we are in the delta quadrant. I very much look forward to seeing some of those posts take shape, and encourage everyone to continue thinking of out of the box ideas for interaction both within the sim and with the other sims within the fleet.

I am also this month awarding the Friendship Ribbon to Ryan North (for the NPC Avery Stiles), Jean Reynard (for the NPC Theodore Vega) and Vex Krylore. Over the past few months these three writers have been leading the way with forging IC friendships amongst their characters in a believable and enjoyable way, and they more than deserve this award. I am also awarding both Ryan and Jean the NPC Award for their work developing the characters of Avery adn Theodore, respectively.

That's it for this month folks. Remember that if you feel someone on the sim is deserving of an award, you can nominate them here, and you can see a full list of the awards we have to give here.
 

USS Highlander Discord Server

Posted on Sat Oct 28th, 2017 @ 6:34pm by Captain Tim Williams in Out of Character

Hey everyone

It's been great seeing everyone get back into the groove of things and progressing joint posts and solo posts lately, and so in an effort to help keep that momentum going (and to increase general OOC communication between us), I've created a Discord server for the sim. For those who haven't used it yet, Discord is a chat app that you can use either within a web page, via desktop app or via a mobile app, which makes it very accessible. Chat logs are also persistent, so you can read up on things that happened while you were offline, or even before you joined the channel in question, which makes it great for communities like ours with members from around the world.

The link to our new server is here: https://discord.gg/KCmU5MM (I'll get to adding a button direct to it and adding the chat widget somewhere on the site soon). Make sure to let me know who you play on the sim when you join (if your display name doesn't make it obvious) so I can get you added to the right groups (some channels are set to crew-only, and you'll also get a department-specific colour added to your display name).

Pegasus Fleet also has a Discord server, so while you're joining ours it might be beneficial to join the overall fleet one too and engage with the wider community. You can get to the fleet's Discord server by visiting https://pegasusfleet.net/chat

As always, keep up the great writing everyone!

New Skin!

Posted on Fri Oct 6th, 2017 @ 7:12pm by Captain Tim Williams in Website Update

Hi everyone

tl;dr: we have a new skin; it's awesome, and works on mobile. Read on for the full details.

It's been over two years since the Highlander's site had a make-over, and so over the past month or so I've been working on a completely new skin exclusively for the site, built using Bootstrap 4 and using icons from Font Awesome. I'm pleased to say that today I finally uploaded it to the site and it is live and (hopefully) ready for use! Head over to your Site Preferences (quick link in your dashboard in the main navigation) to change to it; it's called Astraeus.

Aside from sporting a new, dark-coloured look, the inclusion of Bootstrap now means that the site should display far better on mobile devices than it ever did before. Using the latest version of Bootstrap means I've also had to use the latest version of jQuery, which means that some of the scripts powering parts of the site have had to be upgraded or swapped out too - so do make sure to let me know of anything which no longer works on the new skin. So far the only parts I'm aware of are the preview buttons when selecting a skin (they still work on the old skins if you wanted to take a look at the preview images before switching over).

Using Bootstrap has also meant that I've had to update the code for almost every page on the site to add in the new CSS classes and to swap from the old way of doing things (so many tables, and using kbds instead of labels) to a more Bootstrap-friendly way. The good news is, this should mean that all pages on the site display the way they should, since I've gone through each by hand; but again if you find something that isn't working as expected, particularly on mobile, then let me know and I'll fix it.

I've also rejigged the layout of the site slightly, with some renamed (and in some cases relocated) links in the navigation, and with some links hidden from view to de-clutter the menus slightly. I'm hoping that it will guide people more easily to the content that matters if they're visiting our site for the first time.

The one page that has seen a more complete overhaul is the crew manifest page; I've used a modified version of Emily's personnel cards mod from Anodyne Xtras. As well as a more visual layout you'll also see some new badges showing at the bottom of each card; one shows the total number of posts (both posts and logs) attributed to that character, with a link to see the list of posts, and you'll also see a 'played by' badge in green, which will link you straight to that person's user profile page if you're logged in. It pulls the name from what you set your username as in your profile, so if you set your full name and would prefer it to just give your first name, that's the place to change it. If no username is added, then it will instead say 'user info' - it would be good if we could have some sort of display name there for everybody (even if not your RL name), but for those of you who prefer your privacy the option of leaving it blank is there (and if you're not logged in, it won't show the green badge at all). NPC's have their own badge, which gets swapped out for one for secondary characters if the NPC is linked to an account (secondary characters also get the user badge added to them). The change to the manifest is also replicated on the chain of command page.

I'm going to be going through and doing more updates to the site content over the coming days; updating the text on our pages and filling out a few extra pages on our wiki, so if you see anything that still refers to old information or is just a blank page; don't worry, I'll get to it shortly.

While I've had to make some changes to files that affect the whole site regardless of skin to make this work properly with Bootstrap, I've done my best to make sure that it has minimal to no impact on our other skins, so if you don't like the new one, you can still stick to one of our old ones (our 'Highlander2' skin is the main one I've gone through and tested however; so no guarantees if you're using one of our really old skins).