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

Kumakun

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

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.

My intention is definitely not to alienate players. I think we can bridge the gap between veterans and new players. I'm not saying get rid of the terminal, my codebase would support it. It would be functional, usable and polished - but not my focus. Normal Mux commands would work for the most part for my 'base' install so a veteran player can WHO look, page etc. On top of that, I want to add functionality - like sending more data through WebSockets for game/client information, formatting instructions, etc. One of the reasons I think creating a WebSocket protocol to try to standardize things - hopefully without the mudstandards.org fiasco - would be a good idea.

I honestly, like @faraday, want to make a service where you could push a few buttons, turn a few dials and go if you want through GUI, then log into your game through your preferred client (hopefully through a stand-alone WS client. I don't like having to connect through the browser window either. BUT, if you DO want to really modify you can. I'd love a system to encourage others to share in the spirit of open source.

I really appreciate all of your feedback. I know this topic comes up a lot - probably because it's important to people. Some of us see an opportunity for improvement on a thing we're passionate about, and if you have the ability, why not try?

I'll have to fire up Figma soon and bang out a wireframe/semi-mockup of informational hierarchy, and visual weight for a GUI server management dashboard. I love designing interfaces as much as I love programming.

TNP

@kumakun Regardless of what you do, one thing is absolutely vital: well written, WELL ORGANIZED, help files. Nothing turns me off more than not being able to find what I need to find in order to do something.

Tyche

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

My intention is definitely not to alienate players. I think we can bridge the gap between veterans and new players. I'm not saying get rid of the terminal, my codebase would support it. It would be functional, usable and polished - but not my focus. Normal Mux commands would work for the most part for my 'base' install so a veteran player can WHO look, page etc.

One even alienates veteran players by implementing the wrong CLI command interface. Even the variations in Rhost, Mux, Penn and TinyMush cause some consternation.

WildBaboons

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

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.

This is just.. very incorrect. Any company doing any sort of security will be blocking ssh and all the ports MUs frequently use by default.

Providing access through http/https is the better option by far. every were, from free WiFi at McDonalds to a hotel room allows those ports through. a web filter may block the site, but that's a different beast all together.

Derp

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

Any company doing any sort of security will be blocking ssh and all the ports MUs frequently use by default.

I have worked for at least two of the biggest names in telecom and several governments. No. No they aren't.

Apos

@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 to people who don’t know what a Mu is.

That's a good description but that wasn't what I was getting at. You could say, 'well it's another chat type way of RPing' and that also works, but it doesn't capture why MUs are really, really good at what they do. Like let me give an example.

Say you're trying to run a consistent world like you have in a MU, even ones that might be a sandbox with a ton of characters are running around, and you have a hundred players doing this, and they are all in four different formats: a MU, a PBP forum, a freeform MMO sandbox, and googledocs/discord/some other chat.

Of those four, MUs are the only one that has the ability for players to automatically update the state of play of the game and change it on their own. Like a PBP game might have say, a forum with character sheets, and people edit them, or a MMO sandbox might have an off game forum with some kind of number tracking, or google docs or discord might have someone acting as a GM... but all of those are unbelievably clunky and fall apart incredibly easy as the numbers of players grow. Most of those games have no more uniformity between them than MUs have with each other. People in large PBP forums flat out have no idea what is happening in other parts of the game, and it diverges quickly and there's no attempt to reconcile continuity because it becomes impossible to do so. MMO players won't even try because they can't effect the game environment in a permanent way so its inherently a sandbox and the communities all are fine with handwaving everything and doing spontaneous RP that has no impact past the immediate scene. Google doc, discord, slack, all of that falls apart outside of the immediate group in close coordination with one another.

A MU is the only format that does a large world well, in my opinion. And there's almost no way to tell people about this, because the kind of big world game that's coherent and unified doesn't exist in other formats. So they don't know what's missing, and all it sounds like is more of the same with a different (and worse) interface until they try it. Saying "It's Real-Time Play By Post" would make someone go, "cool, but why should I switch?" And I'd say it's because we have a format that allows for bigger stories, and a real sense of consequence on the game world and meaning in those stories that other formats have trouble duplicating.

WildBaboons

It's seems odd to argue over how mu access from a corporate environment would be allowed but every commercial firewall I can think of is deny by default for traffic. unless some enterprising system admin decided to put in a rule to allow everything (which absolutely does happen, but that's for the RL things I love for people me employeed) they would have to punch holes specifically for the ports that MUs use. Port 80 and 443 are virtually always allowed through, sometimes limited through a proxy and/or web filtering, but unless you're a company with strictly no outside web access those will be allowed.

And again the example of a hotel. A few big chains only allow 80, 443, IPSec ports and a few other protocols to transverse their guest networks.

faraday

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

It's seems odd to argue over how mu access from a corporate environment would be allowed but every commercial firewall I can think of is deny by default for traffic

Well Derp's right that there absolutely are places that would allow SSH over port 4201 (which is not a common attack vector) and yet also have a web filter for productivity reasons. They really do exist, but I agree with you that they're in the minority. That's why web MU clients have caught on.

Though it's worth noting that a lot of work places ban javascript and websockets too. Heck, I had one person whose work banned the Bootstrap CDN for reasons I can't fathom. There's never going to be a solution accessible to every corporate firewall, but I also don't think that should really be a driving goal of any new MU server.

Derp

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

hey really do exist, but I agree with you that they're in the minority.

I mean, for posterity, the places that I mentioned were Verizon, Comcast, and the entirety of the Indiana government network (in.gov, which is controlled by the Indiana Office of Technology), as well as the Marion County local government network (indy.gov).

So minority, maybe, but not exactly insignificant names. And it is a viable option for people still.

Just saying that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Arkandel

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

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.

Just to make it clear, the telnet protocol's age isn't why I object to it - hell, most of what's needed to make a perfectly viable web-only game is easily 10-15 years old by now.

It's that it was never made to support what we're asking it to do. When I type "ls" I never want the output to be changed afterwards (I need to know exactly what I typed, even if it was incorrect), but when I pose "Arkandel slowly picks up his bag slowly" and don't see it until after I hit enter... too bad. It'd sure be nice if I could fix it for more than just the wiki.

Even if someone doesn't want a specific feature it'd be nice if it was possible to even consider it.

faraday

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

It'd sure be nice if I could fix it for more than just the wiki.

Yeah, that's the kind of thing I was talking about earlier. My scene system has a feature that lets you amend your last pose. On the web, it actually edits it, as you'd expect. (Like I edited this post just now.) But in the game, the only option is to re-emit the fixed version.

The same is true of text display. On web I can use full Markdown. I can do bold and italics and links and even multi-tab displays. On a MU client, I get fixed-width ASCII with some ansi colors. Folks have asked me to display wiki pages in-game on Ares. There's nothing technical preventing me from doing so, it's just going to look like crap because the MU client can't handle the formatting.

In both cases, we're talking about the exact same functionality (edit a pose / show a wiki page) but the user-friendliness of said feature is far, far greater on a web client than on an old client.

Note: I'm just using web as an example here because it's already been done. If someone were to make a new desktop client you could do the same thing. The current clients just can't do it because they work like old terminal windows.

Thenomain

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

Even if someone doesn't want a specific feature it'd be nice if it was possible to even consider it.

Which is why designing by committee is usually such a clusterfuck, especially when people talk down perfectly valid features. Everyone has their fan favorites, but I’m having a hard time taking this thread as a commons of ideas because of it.

—

That doesn’t mean I don’t keep having ideas. Something you said made me think:

I’m surprised that nobody has really looked at Discord (Skype, et al.) as a good model. Not just good, but amazing model. Faraday also mentioned being able to append to poses in a logger, and your mention of quick edits, well we’ve had things that validly do this. What we would need, tho, is a new generation of clients.

It would be a hard sell for the lifers, but I still think it’s a vastly superior model.

Arkandel

@thenomain I did look at it a few months ago. Customization was my main roadblock - assuming all the persistent elements can be handled by a bot (sheets and CGen, say), it'd require tools for automation (handing out and spending XP, that sort of thing).

I'd be 100% into that, if such tools I'd consider mandatory can be at least convincingly faked by a Discord bot.

Thenomain

@arkandel

I don’t mean literally using Discord. Discord is our modern IRC. IRC RP is fine, but it’s not a Mu*. I mean using these chat systems as an establishment of ideas that can be used for a modern Mu*.

Arkandel

@thenomain I see. Sure, we'd probably want to take some lessons from those models - @mentions, and all sorts of other UI elements people these days consider no-brainers.

What I was hoping to find was a base multiroom chat platform, fully featured and modular enough to add the RPG elements on top of it. That'd be really convenient to have.

Kumakun

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

@arkandel

I don’t mean literally using Discord. Discord is our modern IRC. IRC RP is fine, but it’s not a Mu*. I mean using these chat systems as an establishment of ideas that can be used for a modern Mu*.

I've been looking to Discord and Slack for how they handle communication at the mobile/desktop level. I actually spent a little time working on a UI inspired by Discord. You're right, we have to look at how people communicate information real-time currently, and where. It's one of the reasons why I'm so pro excellent mobile experience.

faraday

I have also looked at Discord/Slack/etc. for ideas and mentioned it various times this conversation's come up. A lot of people just RP in Discord, so it's a good starting point for looking at the general paradigm.

Kumakun

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

I have also looked at Discord/Slack/etc. for ideas and mentioned it various times this conversation's come up. A lot of people just RP in Discord, so it's a good starting point for looking at the general paradigm.

What other kinds of places have people jumped too besides MU*s? Again, I've been out of the loop for a little while!

Sparks

@kumakun 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.:

I have also looked at Discord/Slack/etc. for ideas and mentioned it various times this conversation's come up. A lot of people just RP in Discord, so it's a good starting point for looking at the general paradigm.

What other kinds of places have people jumped too besides MU*s? Again, I've been out of the loop for a little while!

I think it's less that existing players have 'jumped to' alternatives, and more that many younger RPers start on those alternatives and never even try any MUSH/MUCK/MOO/etc. variant.

Thenomain

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

@kumakun 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.:

I have also looked at Discord/Slack/etc. for ideas and mentioned it various times this conversation's come up. A lot of people just RP in Discord, so it's a good starting point for looking at the general paradigm.

What other kinds of places have people jumped too besides MU*s? Again, I've been out of the loop for a little while!

I think it's less that existing players have 'jumped to' alternatives, and more that many younger RPers start on those alternatives and never even try any MUSH/MUCK/MOO/etc. variant.

Hell, a lot of people did the IRC or PbP thing and never knew about the Mu* options. I run into more of these people every day.

The whole "what did them kids like?" doesn't answer the question, "what did people who weren't us like back in the day?"

That is, I still think we're asking the wrong questions, and fighting about things not entirely worth fighting about.