Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?

[Thenomain]

@griatch said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

What, exactly, is the functionality expected from these three commands

Faraday explained it, but I'll break it down further:

• Finger: Who are you? (often summary and key info about the character)
• Who: Who's online? (often summary only)
• Where: 'Who' but grouped by room. (a heat-map of the game population)

The goal of a lot of Mushlike commands are to facilitate the role-play process, which is usually the primary concern of a Mush.

The main reason I pushed "who" is because it's simple and easy to grasp for a Musher and default WHO output tends to be ugly as sin. It really does serve the same purpose as a guild-based Mud's who: Give me more than just who's online, but a little bit of critical information about them. What is "critical information" will change from game to game.

The main reason I'm not looking for a way to edit the game's default command ("who") is because as a Mush coder, I'm used to making tools for games and not building a game where everything is integrated at every level. Sure, re-creating "who" could be just as easily done in the default command itself, but that is incidental of which of the Basic Three Character-Info Commands I was looking for first.

That is, if we did "finger" first, we wouldn't be having that discussion, but to be honest I thought "who" was a better choice to start with.

I'll be working on "finger" as soon as my Evennia server decides to stop having memory errors on Python 2.7.15. (edit: I uninstall/reinstalled. Works now.)

[Sparks]

@tehom The more I think about it, the more I think a sandbox game with existing code and then a tutorial that walks through a change to that code—like you had suggested earlier in the thread—might really be the better way to go for a starting thing. Because the tutorial, while it's better than nothing, is really covering way too much all at once.

[Sparks]

Okay, so, I don't think that tutorial worked as well as it could. I'm now slowly making a little Evennia sandbox for MUSHers, which will have commands/code they can examine and play with more easily. I'd welcome feedback on it.

Right now it just has a who, where, and finger (with customizable fields) available, along with a basic little 'Notification' class that can be used for customizable blobs of text. The idea here is that you can set notifications to have a prefix if you'd like, which you could then filter in your client to ensure bboard notifications, finger output, WHO output, etc. doesn't end up in your scene logs.

I'd be curious if people think this is more approachable.

The repo's at https://github.com/Packetdancer/evennia-sandbox

[Sab]

@sab said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

Too much shit about starting a tutorial without actually starting the tutorial

Okay, so I mentioned the other day that I wanted to get a barebones, really, really fundamental tutorial started for people getting into Evennia from literally no knowledge at all besides the fact that they want to build a game. I have a lot of reasons for that, which I won't get into unless asked, but the assumption I have while I'm writing this up is that the reader knows basically nothing advanced about computers, MU*s, programming concepts, and Python/Evennia at all.

Work is going to slow down a good deal once I get to the actual meat of it like the actual coding process ('cause a lot of that I'll be figuring out as I write). For now, I've seen more than a few people over time say they've run into trouble with installation, so I'm fleshing that out.

Really, all I'm asking at the moment is for people of all sorts to take a look and see if there's anything you'd like to point out as I go along. Specifically, it'd be really useful if someone who's never tried to install Evennia before can check it out and see if what I'm saying makes sense, and point out where it doesn't, and for experienced people to tell me if I fucked anything up.

As of this typing, I have a pretty basic To-Do list for the Installation section, as well as a few other sections I know I want to work on in some capacity or another. I have a prototype of how I want the actual content to be structured (Thanks again Pax), and then a basic draft started of the first couple sections.

I know this is going to take a while to get finished, but selfishly the act of writing this whole thing out in really basic terms will help me learn it, and holistically I'm hoping to lessen the barrier to entry that a lot of people with really good ideas have when they're just getting started.

I have a test tomorrow, but I've been studying all day, so for the rest of the night I figure I'll keep working on this in between prepping for my cert exam tomorrow. With that, I'll be around for a while, so if you're interested in chatting about this, coding, or whatever else, you can hit me up on here or on discord at Sab#1239.

ETA: I'm a fucking idiot and forgot to link the doc so rip:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-C9txEcopx_G6_CKl8kUNZ-xJp1AYX-TrD75EskmZ5w/edit?usp=sharing

[Griatch]

@faraday , @Thenomain
Thanks for the examples!

@Sparks
As said, I'm not the target audience, but it's a good start I think. Maybe you should (already in your README since that is the front-page of github), add links to the places in your code where people can find the concepts (finger, notifications etc) so they can quickly dive into the bits they are interested in.

@Sab
That's an ambitious project! I've tried to give a few comments on your Google Doc. Will be interesting to see how it goes.
.
Griatch

[Tat]

@griatch said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

Maybe you should (already in your README since that is the front-page of github), add links to the places in your code where people can find the concepts (finger, notifications etc) so they can quickly dive into the bits they are interested in.

This is a great idea. One of the things I didn't realize early on in coding Ares was that I could search git for code snippets to see them at work. Little tips like this, or links to relevant code, are super useful.

[Sparks]

@griatch said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

@Sparks
As said, I'm not the target audience, but it's a good start I think. Maybe you should (already in your README since that is the front-page of github), add links to the places in your code where people can find the concepts (finger, notifications etc) so they can quickly dive into the bits they are interested in.

That's an excellent idea. I've tried to clean it up a bit and add some hints on where to look.

[Griatch]

@sparks said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

@griatch said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

@Sparks
As said, I'm not the target audience, but it's a good start I think. Maybe you should (already in your README since that is the front-page of github), add links to the places in your code where people can find the concepts (finger, notifications etc) so they can quickly dive into the bits they are interested in.

That's an excellent idea. I've tried to clean it up a bit and add some hints on where to look.

Github even allows you to make clickable links to individual source files or lines of source files, so the opportunities to direct people into the code are many.
.
Griatch

[Thenomain]

@griatch said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

@sparks said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

@griatch said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

@Sparks
As said, I'm not the target audience, but it's a good start I think. Maybe you should (already in your README since that is the front-page of github), add links to the places in your code where people can find the concepts (finger, notifications etc) so they can quickly dive into the bits they are interested in.

That's an excellent idea. I've tried to clean it up a bit and add some hints on where to look.

Github even allows you to make clickable links to individual source files or lines of source files, so the opportunities to direct people into the code are many.
.
Griatch

You can also add comments per line, can’t you? It would be a good way to load up the commentary without adding it to the inline comments.

[Griatch]

@thenomain said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

@griatch said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

@sparks said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

@griatch said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

@Sparks
As said, I'm not the target audience, but it's a good start I think. Maybe you should (already in your README since that is the front-page of github), add links to the places in your code where people can find the concepts (finger, notifications etc) so they can quickly dive into the bits they are interested in.

That's an excellent idea. I've tried to clean it up a bit and add some hints on where to look.

Github even allows you to make clickable links to individual source files or lines of source files, so the opportunities to direct people into the code are many.
.
Griatch

You can also add comments per line, can’t you? It would be a good way to load up the commentary without adding it to the inline comments.

You can link to lines, but I don't think you can add comments to existing code in the GitHub interface - you can only do so on code that is under review. Even if you could I suspect it would be highly unstable way to keep comments since that line number is likely to change rapidly as the code evolves. Linking to a line faces the same problem, which is why we most often links to modules than to lines unless the module is very stable and not likely to change much.

.
Griatch