Questions About Evennia

Griatch

What would be nice to have would be a "Evennia for MUSH users" actually written by a MUSH user who also knows Evennia to go into the Evennia for <Engine>-users category of our tutorials. I contributed a small article (which first appeared on here) but it is only very broad and I'm not musher to begin with. Alas, no musher has actually stepped up to that challenge (and I've asked about it for years in our forums). It's not just mush-coders for sure; people with experience in other engines seems just as unwilling to write comparisons it seems.
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Griatch

BobGoblin

I'm actually in the process of transitioning all my work from MU base to Evennia base. As I'm going through this process the need for 'comparisons' of things becomes more clear. I would second the idea of a MUSH to Evennia type structure to both help and inform. A sort of 'Doing this in MUSH is like this: Doing it in Evennia is like this:' That I think would help people see the advantages / disadvantages and help bridge the gap. As a noob coder, a lot of times it's terminologies and syntax that are the issues. So yes, Rosetta Stone?

RnMissionRun

@griatch said in Questions About Evennia:

What would be nice to have would be a "Evennia for MUSH users" actually written by a MUSH user who also knows Evennia to go into the Evennia for <Engine>-users category of our tutorials. I contributed a small article (which first appeared on here) but it is only very broad and I'm not musher to begin with. Alas, no musher has actually stepped up to that challenge (and I've asked about it for years in our forums). It's not just mush-coders for sure; people with experience in other engines seems just as unwilling to write comparisons it seems.
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Griatch

It's not that I unwilling to write such a document, it's just that Evennia is so different from MUSH that I wouldn't even know where to start. It would be like trying to write a "Operating a dump truck guide" for bicyclists. Sure there are superficial similarities between those two things-- they're both vehicles with tires, for example, but the differences are orders of magnitude apart.

If you're an experienced MUSHer interested in learning Evennia, I suggest that first, you get yourself a good Python tutorial and learn the basics of the language. Remember, Evennia is 100% Python, you will need to know it and knowing it beforehand will help you make sense of things when you start tinkering with the actual server. Once you're a little familiar with Python, install Evennia and start tinkering. If you have questions, join the IRC or, in the event that you're turned off by the MUD-centric nature of most of the IRC chatter, find a game in the Evennia Games Index and try asking for help there. I'm always happy to answer questions on my site (The Big Empty) and Tirit is also (Deep Shadows).

Griatch

As for learning Python, I recently wrote a tutorial for people wanting to get their very first taste of Python through Evennia-examples only. You (should) only need a text editor and Evennia up and running to start. You can find it here: https://github.com/evennia/evennia/wiki/Python-basic-introduction

@RnMissionRun
I don't agree with this notion. Of course you can always make relevant comparisons. For someone like you who used mush and now is learning Evennia, just documenting the pitfalls and things you have to think differently about to progress would be useful to others.
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Griatch

faraday

@rnmissionrun said in Questions About Evennia:

It would be like trying to write a "Operating a dump truck guide" for bicyclists.

I don't think it's that different. All programming languages share many core similarities.

The way you input the code is very different, and that's a big learning curve. No argument. But switch vs if? Dolist versus each? Emit versus ... msg (I think that's the Evennia equivalent)? These are not universes apart. Comparison tutorials exist for many other languages (C#->Python for instance) and there's no reason why one couldn't be made for MuCode->Evennia. I'm working on one for Ares, in fact.

RnMissionRun

More documentation can only help.

Thenomain

@rnmissionrun said in Questions About Evennia:

More documentation can only help.

Said someone who apparently hasn’t had to make sense of Arx’s files.

I kid. Well, I’m completely serious, but I kid that it’s just Arx which is bad at documentation or that Arx has such bad documentation that it’s in the realm of harmful, but it’s a good starting point. If you ever looked at a wall of text and your brain froze up, that’s bad documentation. If you ever tried to find something in a sea of nonsense, trying to cross refrerence information with no help from the writer, that’s bad documentation.

Evennia has incredibly good documentation, and I trust them to be aiming toward better documentation, toward better organization, etc., all the time.

RnMissionRun

@thenomain said in Questions About Evennia:

@rnmissionrun said in Questions About Evennia:

More documentation can only help.

Said someone who apparently hasn’t had to make sense of Arx’s files.

I have not. Arx is a fine game I'm sure, and I'm intrigued that it uses Evennia. It's just not my kind of game.

boneghazi

Wow. I wasn't expecting such an overwhelmingly helpful response and so quickly too!

First of all, thank you everyone for your input and guidance. It is extremely appreciated.

@roz said in Questions About Evennia:

@nyctophiliac said in Questions About Evennia:

How customizable is the system? Like say for instance I wanted to run an nWoD 2.0 game (>_>), is it feasible? Is the current release stable enough for my coder to tinker around with tweaking this?

AFAIK you can do anything you want as long as you know Python. It comes with very little built in out of the box.

Wiki! I've been looking at the games hosted, and they all have wikis that seem similar in design. Is this powered by a 3rd party wiki something akin to mediawiki? Or was it hand coded to suit Evennia?

There's a default website template, which is why a lot of the websites look similar, but they're not wikis.

Thank you! You hit the nail on the head with both of these responses. Especially about the webpage/wiki. I just assumed it was some kind of wiki because of all the integration Arx has. No wonder it works, it's not done in media wiki. XD

@rnmissionrun said in Questions About Evennia:

It's very customizable, but of course non-trivial things will require some skill to accomplish.

Not sure what you mean by this, are you talking about the main Evennia wiki?

The core system is functional but still pretty light since it's meant to be an extensible framework and not a MU*-in-a-box type of thing. There's no mail system, boards system , no concept of object "ownership" in the traditional sense, characters don't even have genders, etc. There are numerous contributed modules that make up for some of these, you can find those here.

Thank you! This list of modules is like 15k% helpful and I think what I was looking for when I asked for a "features list".
As for the wiki, I did mean what Roz mentioned, like why did all of the games that use evennia look related? I wanted to know if they used some kind of established wiki to create their webpage/template, and if so, was it integrated?
I know there was an issue recently with a bridge between evennia and mediawiki, which was another reason why I was asking. I've tried to integrate mediawiki before into chat clients and such for a web pages java chat RPG site I hosted for about 3 or 4 years. I could never, ever get the bridge to work.

@griatch said in Questions About Evennia:

We are not tired of people asking questions in the Evennia support channel. If people don't reply right away it's usually because people are preoccupied, not that they ignore you. Time zone differences are also a thing, People are spread all over.

Yes. Evennia works quite differently under the hood compared to your average mush though.

Evennia is its own web server and has a default website and webclient it starts along with the server. There is no wiki out of the box.

Maybe https://github.com/evennia/evennia/wiki/Evennia-Introduction or https://github.com/evennia/evennia/tree/master/evennia/contrib ?
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Griatch
@griatch said in Questions About Evennia:
As for learning Python, I recently wrote a tutorial for people wanting to get their very first taste of Python through Evennia-examples only. You (should) only need a text editor and Evennia up and running to start. You can find it here: https://github.com/evennia/evennia/wiki/Python-basic-introduction

@RnMissionRun
I don't agree with this notion. Of course you can always make relevant comparisons. For someone like you who used mush and now is learning Evennia, just documenting the pitfalls and things you have to think differently about to progress would be useful to others.
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Griatch

Oh please don't misunderstand I never thought you guys were /truly/ tired of answering my questions at all. As a matter of fact, whenever I have posed a question of any sort on the IRC/Discord channel, I've always gotten a response. Incredibly helpful community you have. And I'm glad you haven't tired of me just yet because I have 0 experience in coding and will likely be asking hundreds more. (Ok. Well I do CSS, PHP, Java, HTML but those are hardly relevant at the moment).
I'm going to have a look through your python basic introduction as soon as possible to see if I can wrap my head around it. I do have a python module coming up in college, but in the meanwhile I'm attempting to get my feet wet a bit by learning /something/. I usually just start with a project, break it repeatedly, and then fix it until I finally know what I'm doing.

@apos said in Questions About Evennia:

If you have your heart set on a wiki I'm sure there's a lot of random django apps for it. Googled and saw https://github.com/django-wiki/django-wiki at a glance.

Going to look into this as well. I do LOVE wikis. As a game admin, I am an organizational freak and I like how I can structure a wiki, present information, organize it, etc, and have other contributors as well to aid in the fleshing out of a world, leave their mark, etc. As a player, I like contributing to settings when I can. Makes my tiny shriveled black heart grow three sizes.

@tirit said in Questions About Evennia:

Evennia is a great way to go. Since it uses Python it can pretty much do anything Python can. Excluding anything in Python3.

Also Python is a much easier concept to learn then the old outdated MU code.

The index is a good way to find out which games are being developed. Arx being the current one that's past the pre-alpha/alpha stage.

If you want to discuss more, you can also login to connect.deepshadowsmush.com and ping Bremen. I can talk to you about development on Evennia as well from a person who knows nothing about programming and how much easier Evennia was to do.

I played on Arx for a while and it's what made me fall in love with Evennia.
Not that I don't think Thenomain and others haven't made strides with it and made beautiful systems. That's where I fell in love with MU'ing. In fact, if I could figure out mushcode, I'd be perfectly happy running my mu on it. Sadly, there's more documentation/resources available for learning python. Or Ruby for ARES. Which is ultimate why I'm steering this direction.
Also! I have logged in to deep shadows and I'm poking around a bit. I don't expect to be around all that much until the Holidays are over, but I hope to run into you there soon. I look forward to it.

@rnmissionrun said in Questions About Evennia:

@griatch said in Questions About Evennia:
If you're an experienced MUSHer interested in learning Evennia, I suggest that first, you get yourself a good Python tutorial and learn the basics of the language. Remember, Evennia is 100% Python, you will need to know it and knowing it beforehand will help you make sense of things when you start tinkering with the actual server. Once you're a little familiar with Python, install Evennia and start tinkering. If you have questions, join the IRC or, in the event that you're turned off by the MUD-centric nature of most of the IRC chatter, find a game in the Evennia Games Index and try asking for help there. I'm always happy to answer questions on my site (The Big Empty) and Tirit is also (Deep Shadows).

I agree that this might be how I need to start. I am going to familiarize myself with Python first, because I need to know, at the very least, the terminology! So thank you for the direction I may hit you up after the holidays are over and the dust settles from the stampede of family obligations upon me. I appreciate it very very much.

@Thenomain : A special thank you for your contributions on this thread, too.

Sorry I didn't get to some of the comments (a few were above my head :3) But I love the discussion and it's getting my gumption up to start something!

Apos

I figure you have a few different options, and I honestly couldn't tell you what would work best for you or what you might find easiest to implement, since I think you'll have to take a look and putter with them a bit before you make a decision. You could have the default evennia webpage with a separate wiki that imports data, which is what we wound up with right now but it has its drawbacks. You could integrate a django wiki app with the webpage to have the functionality of both. Or you could try to just add in wiki like functionality to the webpage without adding in a whole app for it. I'm honestly not sure what would best suit your needs or be easiest, so I'd just take a look and think of approaches and then ask for advice on the evennia chat.

Roz

@nyctophiliac said in Questions About Evennia:

Wow. I wasn't expecting such an overwhelmingly helpful response and so quickly too!

First of all, thank you everyone for your input and guidance. It is extremely appreciated.

@roz said in Questions About Evennia:

@nyctophiliac said in Questions About Evennia:

How customizable is the system? Like say for instance I wanted to run an nWoD 2.0 game (>_>), is it feasible? Is the current release stable enough for my coder to tinker around with tweaking this?

AFAIK you can do anything you want as long as you know Python. It comes with very little built in out of the box.

Wiki! I've been looking at the games hosted, and they all have wikis that seem similar in design. Is this powered by a 3rd party wiki something akin to mediawiki? Or was it hand coded to suit Evennia?

There's a default website template, which is why a lot of the websites look similar, but they're not wikis.

Thank you! You hit the nail on the head with both of these responses. Especially about the webpage/wiki. I just assumed it was some kind of wiki because of all the integration Arx has. No wonder it works, it's not done in media wiki. XD

We have a player-run wiki for Arx here. It has a regular data pull from Arx's server -- I think hourly? We mostly made it so that it would be easier to write up player guides and also organize some of the data that the Arx website wasn't really offering at that point. I don't think we've had trouble with the data pull, but I also wasn't the one to set up that part. I managed the templates and such.

Griatch

@nyctophiliac said in Questions About Evennia:

Oh please don't misunderstand I never thought you guys were /truly/ tired of answering my questions at all. As a matter of fact, whenever I have posed a question of any sort on the IRC/Discord channel, I've always gotten a response. Incredibly helpful community you have. And I'm glad you haven't tired of me just yet because I have 0 experience in coding and will likely be asking hundreds more. (Ok. Well I do CSS, PHP, Java, HTML but those are hardly relevant at the moment).

At least CSS and HTML are both very relevant if you want to get creative with your web experience!
But yes, don't be shy to ask questions. It's always hard to get into a new library, especially so if the language itself is unfamiliar. It can also be diffucult for us devs that already know the system well to perceive what is confusing, unclear or hard for a newcomer to grasp; so questions help us too in a way.
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Griatch