I think something very easy and simple can be done to make it more useful, by, as you said, linking it to namecolorizing.
Add an option
'Download factions data to your pipboy' to the Terminal. This option will set
( in your local Namecolorozing.txt) the NameColor attribute of your faction's members to
myFactionColor (or anything you want). Identically, it will set it to
EnnemyColor and
FriendlyColor for characters marked as ennemy or as friendly which are present in your faction terminal.
If they want, people can change the color for
myFactionColor, EnnemyColor, FriendlyColor manually in their file or through their Pipboy. By default you could set them to a simple Green, Red, Blue.
To go farther, it will give a specific NameColor for members of each faction present in the terminal :
factionAcolor, factionBcolor. Faction officers could select a color for each of them, or by default it will use
EnnemyColor is faction is marked as ennemy,
FriendlyColor if friendly, or nothing if unknown or neutral.
Also for allowing individual color management
(independant from your faction terminal) , you could add another file,
(or another section in the same file)which is not updated by terminal and has higher priority in case of conflict with the other.( you could update it ingame using Pipboy).
- adding a whole faction as friend/enemy (high)
I like it, but i would like to add something about it :
If you mark
factionA as ennemy in your computer, it should set the status of all
factionA members to ennemy, but only those who are marked in the terminal as belonging to this
factionA. I mean, it should not allow you to know magically if somebody belongs to
factionA, you should still discover it by your own ways before, and add this information in the terminal.
There can be problem with this feature, if for example player has 2 characters and 2 different factions, in this case 2 files may have to be used locally (
character1name_color.txt, character2name_color.txt). i hope it is not too unclear.
The main idea is that on one hand,
the pipboy contain knowledge specific to this character, and on the other hand, the
terminal hold faction knowledge with the possibility to export it to any faction member pipboy on demand. This will
allow mass and single operations more easily, without automate everything, and so it will
let some work to the player, and also it sounds
realistic, at least to me.
I think it does not require much reworking to implement most of this idea (except creating a ColorBoy interface, but as it was said before you can use something like fixboy interface), but i can be wrong.
Give me feedback.