decide on profile format

[pshaughn]

• what information does the profile hold? by design this can change without breaking existing users
• how is the profile string formatted? try to design this so an old profile is meaningful as new fields are added, and so parsing an invalid one won't throw javascript exceptions (JSON fails on that requirement; fixed-width string could pass as long as the parse code can accept undefined instead of a character). make sure length cap will never be reached.
• create a default profile given a username, in a hash-like fashion
• client-side support to decode profile string (used by both client.html and selfserve.html), needs to have safe defaults; totally garbled string should just return default profile, partially readable string should use what it can
• client-side widget to edit profile, encode profile string (used just by selfserve.html, but makes sense to put it in the same file as decode)
• add profile editor to selfserve.html; keep gui crude for now

[pshaughn]

one thing that'd be generally good is color scheme, maybe a 1st, 2nd and 3rd color that must be distinct, chosen from a finite palette that does not include anything too close to pure white or black. these could be encoded as just 3 characters in the profile string, with default behavior kicking in if a later character is the same as an earlier one. games could use these colors in different ways, including taking them as representative colors from larger subpalettes instead of just using the exact rgb

[pshaughn]

first pass at it is not picking defaults well; the username "hashing" is actually throwing out most of it, and it's not avoiding redundant colors.

[pshaughn]

so far so good; first three characters of profile are base-32 selections from a 32-color palette, although the desaturated green/blues might be a bit too close together

[pshaughn]

above considerations are not going to be valid if the current rewrite works; user data will be arbitrary json values set only by playset code. there will need to be considerations of which values are worth keeping persistent across game modes though