What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.

[TNP]

@faraday said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

But the simple, inescapable fact is that the overwhelming majority of veteran MU players will not switch to a new client. I've still got people reporting Ares issues with SimpleMU for pete's sake, and that hasn't been supported in, like, a decade.

Thing is, it doesn't need to be supported because it already does things well. I've tried Potato. It's okay. It can do things Simplemu can't: things I don't really need nor want. Things that aren't worth the time investment needed to learn the ins and outs of a new client that behaves differently to things that are now automatic to me when using SImplemu. The one thing about Simplemu that it can't do that I'd like is the expanded color palette. But that's so minor, it's not worth switching.

So a new client, web or otherwise, would need to do things so radically better than Simplemu to make it worthwhile. And for simple text based gaming, what do we really need? A few extra bells and whistles don't cut it.

[Apos]

What MUs do best as a format is something that is hard to describe to a roleplayers in other formats. We keep larger worlds consistent and coherent with a unified pay environment, that most PBP and freeform chat environments just can't do outside of their immediate circle of friends. And until someone gets swept up into a big story, most won't even see the appeal, let alone why they should struggle through a terrible, archaic and ugly format.

[Kumakun]

I'm hearing a lot of mixed reviews, this is great! It's exactly what I wanted. Pain points are the life-blood of innovation. It's interesting hearing from both sides of the aisle as it were, on what to change or not, and why.

I see the importance, for now, of keeping some backward compatibility. While it's dire that we bring new people into the hobby - as that's how hobbies are kept alive - yet we can't forget those that founded the community. Good point!

A web-based MU isn't out of the question, but to get some players to connect there needs to be a client that, from what I'm hearing, works like SImpleMu (spawns spawns spawns!) but handles TCP and WebSocket connections. I'll have to fire up SimpleMu (I still have it installed) and remember what the interface was like! I'm sure just adding inline spell check would win some people over like myself. Heck, using Electron (which I love) you could have a desktop GUI for that, and a desktop interface for admin tasks as well. With PhoneGap (Cordova) a decent native mobile client isn't out of the question. It would be interesting to apply a little modern UI design to the Mu Window layout/hierarchy/priority and get feedback.

I'd definitely want to use MUX as my jumping point for command structure/style, and update as new play/usage patterns evolve. I like the generalized simple database architecture too. I'm not 100% convinced that the game server itself needs a full-on ORM, or flat-files (JS API's don't care either way).

I'm not sure if I'd make an 'in-game' scripting language off the bat, it's extremely possible to do with JS, but adding commands and systems as Node style Dependency Injection or more so Inversion of Control style container 'plugins' for game developers should be the primary way to add new functionality I think. Something that could be done from the CLI or GUI depending on your style. Want a BBS? drop (or click from a list) a plugin, the MU does a dependency check, and go!

Granted, none of this is 'in a weekend easy mode', but it's all been done before several times that I know of, which could be easy to model from without much more than rote programming to get a proof of concept up. Enough to try and start enticing some open source help.

[brent]

@derp said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

I guess this depends on what you mean by 'nicely'. Potato handles spawns just fine.

At the risk of of being outed as a filthy self-quoter...

@brent said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Why Potato's spawn UI is garbage, courtesy of 5 minutes in paint tool SAI

[faraday]

@tnp said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

And for simple text based gaming, what do we really need? A few extra bells and whistles don't cut it.

People find value in different things. Stuff like dual input windows, not having garbage on your screen because SimpleMU doesn't support the unicode standard used by every modern software program, separating OOC spam and channels and pages stuff in a way that doesn't require you to bend over backwards doing regex's. Incorporating things that are in every chat program under the sun - @mentions, markdown formatting, heck even something as simple as being able to edit a pose or page after you've sent it. And that's not even beginning to touch the sort of interactive things that can move us beyond the type of bbpost <board>=<subject>/<message> commands that are completely alien to an entire generation of people.

There's way more we can do than 'bells and whistles', but it's going to take time to get people shifted.

[Kumakun]

@faraday said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

@tnp said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

And for simple text based gaming, what do we really need? A few extra bells and whistles don't cut it.

People find value in different things. Stuff like dual input windows, not having garbage on your screen because SimpleMU doesn't support the unicode standard used by every modern software program, separating OOC spam and channels and pages stuff in a way that doesn't require you to bend over backwards doing regex's. Incorporating things that are in every chat program under the sun - @mentions, markdown formatting, heck even something as simple as being able to edit a pose or page after you've sent it. And that's not even beginning to touch the sort of interactive things that can move us beyond the type of bbpost <board>=<subject>/<message> commands that are completely alien to an entire generation of people.

There's way more we can do than 'bells and whistles', but it's going to take time to get people shifted.

I would definitely like to talk more on @mentions and markdown formatting. In the age of CSS it's interesting to think how much we let the games handle, and how much we give to the client and still retain some sort of consistency of visual communication.

[Kumakun]

@brent Very good point!

[krmbm]

I think the way Ares is going is about the only way we're ever going to really "modernize" M*s. Yes, switching from MUSH/MUX coding to a real language is nifty, but it's nifty for us, the existing players. It doesn't really help the hobby become any more appealing to people who haven't been doing it for years.

Eventually, just based on the Ares wish list, you'll be able to do everything on the web that you can do on the MUSH itself. Already, you can create a character, send it through CharGen, get it approved, (chat on channels the whole time) and start roleplaying without ever logging in to the MUSH.

And you're doing it prettily, not just punching the commands in through a telnet window embedded in a web-page. "Here's the box where I put my description, and here's the submit button, and here's + button to raise a stat, and here's the - button to lower it."

Once we reach the point that you really can do everything you can do from the MUSH and still use your client, the gradual shift away from clients will be a lot easier to accomplish. Whether this happens via Ares or something else as user-friendly to the end user - not the coders - is still up in the air.

But trying to rush it is pointless. It was only 2 years ago that games opened without any web presence at all. Baby steps.

[Thenomain]

@apos said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

What MUs do best as a format is something that is hard to describe to a roleplayers in other formats.

I will nonetheless try:

Real-Time Play By Post

I have used this description to great effect to people who don’t know what a Mu is.

—

Otherwise, in response to this thread in general, “It’s not really a Mush lol” is not helpful. Lord British did not think of that when he made Ultima Online. He said, “I want a Mud, but graphical.”

When Colossal Caverns and Adventure came out, the thought wasn’t to create a new medium, but to make Zork, just online.

Think about what can be done. Getting caught up in the semantics is...well, many of us are nerds and programmers and can’t help it, but relentless focus on it holds us back.

—

Edit: And another thing, this “telnet is antiquated” talk should stop. People use SSH daily. Obscuring it is not a bad idea, but throwing out a common protocol just because it’s old is shooting yourself in the foot.

Throw it out because you want to do something that it can’t do.

[TNP]

@faraday I have no clue what you're talking about so how would I know if I need/want them or not? @mentions? Mark down formatting? Seems like part of the problem right there.

[Tinuviel]

@thenomain The only problem I've got with the idea as presented is that it is designed specifically to appeal to new people. That's all fine and good on its own, but if you're advertising it as a MUSH people are going to look up what a MUSH is. And if your thing is markedly different (which is, I believe, the point) to what we already have then people aren't any more likely to bother with the new thing than what we've got.

[Kumakun]

@thenomain said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

@apos said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

What MUs do best as a format is something that is hard to describe to a roleplayers in other formats.

I will nonetheless try:

Real-Time Play By Post

I have used this description to great effect on people who don’t know what a Mu* is.

I've used this description myself! Real-time PbP. More recently, it's real-time Storium with dice. That tends to raise eyebrows. In fact, that philosophy has kind of been at the back of my mind on what updated real-time text-based RP could look like.

Otherwise, in response to this thread in general, “It’s not really a Mush lol” is not helpful. Lord British did not think of that when he made Ultima Online. He said, “I want a Mud, but graphical.”

When Colossal Caverns and Adventure came out, the thought wasn’t to create a new medium, but to make Zork, just online.

Think about what can be done. Getting caught up in the semantics is...well,
many of us are nerds and programmers and can’t help it, but relentless focus on it holds us back.

I agree with this. Both in the way mediums change, and how resistant we can be to it when it involves something we're passionate about.

Edit: And another thing, this “telnet is antiquated” talk should stop. People use SSH daily. Obscuring it is not a bad idea, but throwing out a common protocol just because it’s old is shooting yourself in the foot.

Throw it out because you want to do something that it can’t do.

PFT. Like I need to log in to the CLI of my server every day...

[faraday]

@thenomain said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

this “telnet is antiquated” talk should stop. People use SSH daily

I agree with everything else you said, but this one thing...

Highly technical people use SSH daily. Your average consumer/gamer simply doesn't use anything like that on a regular basis. Command-line interfaces are already a barrier. When you consider that there's an entire generation of kids growing up now who are frustrated when a screen isn't a touchscreen, this problem is only going to get worse over time.

Obviously text is still going to be the focal point of play because it's a writing game, but chaining our games to a CLI is a bad long-term plan IMHO. People say 'telnet' as a shortcut, which is bad, but it's not the protocol it's the human interface. You could switch it over to JSON HTTPS on the back-end and that doesn't solve the fundamental problem.

[Tinuviel]

@faraday said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

but chaining our games to a CLI is a bad long-term plan IMHO

Why?

Secondary question: Do we need a long-term plan?

[Derp]

@faraday said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

Highly technical people use SSH daily. Your average consumer/gamer simply doesn't use anything like that on a regular basis.

False.

Many of the people in this hobby use SSH because companies block web interfaces that are labelled as a game, but Telnet / SSH is so old that nobody even bothers trying to shut it down anymore. I can download and run Putty or Potato or whatever on whatever computer I am on, connect to whatever game I want to, and I don't have to worry about whether the netfilter is going to block my web app because someone used the word 'Game' too many times.

Just because it isn't flashy and happens to be old doesn't mean that it isn't necessary for a good many of us. Ignoring it because it isn't trendy is a bad move.

[faraday]

@derp said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

False. Many of the people in this hobby use SSH because...

Evidence? MUSHers are not the average consumer/gamer, which is who I was referring to. The average person has never even heard of SSH let alone are in the habit of downloading PuTTY to try to circumvent network firewalls at work.

CLIs have a place in the tech world. There are usability and automation rationales for including them, though even many IT folks are shifting away from them in favor of other tools. I agree with the Wired article that CLIs are not going away any time soon, but even that article points out (emphasis mine):

Though the average computer user has no need for a command line, it's still an essential tool for developers and system adminstrators who require access to guts of our machines

If you're marketing a game system solely to computer admins, developers and veteran MUSHers - sure, by all means, stay with CLI. But that's not really what this thread is about.

@tinuviel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

Do we need a long-term plan?

Depends on the "we". The average MUSHer, certainly not. But for folks like me, the Evennia team, and @Kumakun who are investing in design for the next generation of platforms - I should hope so.

[Tinuviel]

@faraday said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

But for folks like me, the Evennia team, and @Kumakun who are investing in design for the next generation of platforms - I should hope so.

Sure. But if those future plans aren't aimed at us... why ask for our input? Not aiming this at you fara, but at the thread itself.

ETA: I'm all for making coder's and/or programmers' lives easier, so y'all do what you need to do on the backend to make that work for you. But if you want to include us in this bright new future you've envisioned, maybe don't make radical changes to the bits we use regularly. Make other stuff, sure, but don't penalise us for choosing what we prefer over what's new and fancy.

[Sparks]

@tinuviel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

@faraday said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

But for folks like me, the Evennia team, and @Kumakun who are investing in design for the next generation of platforms - I should hope so.

Sure. But if those future plans aren't aimed at us... why ask for our input? Not aiming this at you fara, but at the thread itself.

I think because there's an implication that we want fresh blood in the community. And for folks who have grown up never seeing a DOS prompt and who find laptops that don't have touchscreens frustrating, SimpleMU (or Potato, or Atlantis, much less tinyfugue) is not a friendly or intuitive interface. This isn't to say everyone new is going to eschew traditional clients, but it lowers the barrier to entry if you don't require them.

I'm personally loathe to leave behind Atlantis myself, because I like how my spawns work, and I hate having a separate tab in my web-browser open for every world I'm on, and so on. And most web-clients don't give me anything better than I can already get with a local interface. (Plus, Evennia has a screenreader setting and a strict 'all stock code must be screenreader friendly' policy, which are much easier to enforce over a plaintext interface than a web-one.)

But that doesn't mean I don't want web integration to make it easier for others to join in. Plus, there are a lot of things I think I do prefer to use on the web: bboards, mail, +job systems, etc. This is why my stock Evennia toolkit I'm building has a strong focus on web integration.

Faraday's ideas for how 'scenes' can work—a web interface sort of like Storify rather than a traditional web-client, but still supporting a traditional plaintext interface for old-school users—are a good example of a place that feedback from existing MU*ers can be valuable.

After all, even moving forward, there's a desire not to completely leave behind the people who are already in this hobby, so there's a desire to see what people think of new ideas.

Now, if people don't want to invite in new blood, or don't want to make games more accessible to people, that's fine; this conversation probably isn't for them. But there are a lot of people—the folks working with Ares or Evennia, the Penn and Rhost teams trying to graft web integration into existing servers, etc.—who want to find the way to not just leave behind existing players, but to bridge the gap so there's continuity between current MU*ers and RPers who are just coming into the hobby.

And I think that's what this conversation is about, and why it recurs so often around here.

[Thenomain]

@faraday said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

Highly technical people use SSH daily. Your average consumer/gamer simply doesn't use anything like that on a regular basis.

Wait, I've got this:

@thenomain said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

Obscuring it is not a bad idea

Literally the next line of what you quoted.

And the line after that:

Throw it out because you want to do something that it can’t do.

So I'm not sure why you decided to point out what you did, because I'm already agreeing with the move, just wanting people to do it for reasons other than "because it's old".

I obviously failed, but at least I tried.

--

Hell, people use HTTPS on a regular basis and don't know it. It's obscured. It's obscured to keep people from needing to know, but there because it's a good fit.

So yeah, why on earth does it matter who uses SSH if it's a good fit? And if it's not a good fit...then I reiterate: Why on earth does it matter who uses it?

"Who uses it" may be an indicator of what a good tool is, but since you only corrected me for...reasons I completely don't understand, and didn't explain it, I can only assume that you did it to be More Correct(tm).

*shrug*

[faraday]

@thenomain said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

I can only assume that you did it to be More Correct(tm).

*shrug*

Or maybe it was because I misunderstood the point you were trying to make, given the context of other remarks surrounding yours in the discussion. But by all means assume the worst. That always gets us far.