Talking 'Bout Ares
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@reason No offense meant or taken. I was just responding to your assertion that it was solely a matter of personal preference. I see it as a usability issue, which goes a bit deeper.
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@faraday said in Talking 'Bout Ares:
the average player doesn't actually know or care
There, that's what my brain did.
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I have noticed that one of the most common complaints that I hear about MUSH on the Evennia Dev site, is the "weird and confusing" command syntax. This includes command prefixes, switches and use of the "=" sign to separate args.
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yes, but on like... all games. I've been Muing for almost twenty years and on my original game I STILL cannot remember when commands start with a + or a @.
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Newer codebases removing command prefixes is literally the best thing to happen to this hobby in like 20 years.
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@faraday said in Talking 'Bout Ares:
@reason No offense meant or taken. I was just responding to your assertion that it was solely a matter of personal preference. I see it as a usability issue, which goes a bit deeper.
Fair. Design paradigm may have been a better description than personal preference -- there's a notion of preference in a design paradigm, of course, but it may transcend the personal. For instance, in your case, a design paradigm that heavily caters to the users of the system itself (which, may not be a bad paradigm to adopt!).
@rnmissionrun said in Talking 'Bout Ares:
I have noticed that one of the most common complaints that I hear about MUSH on the Evennia Dev site, is the "weird and confusing" command syntax. This includes command prefixes, switches and use of the "=" sign to separate args.
That sounds like the 'Default MUX Parser' version of the Evennia command parser. That's one of the configurations you can inherit into the game, or use at discretion. Mimics some/most/all of TinyMU* syntax, IIRC. Should be optional to implement, though could be the default configuration.
-r
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@silverfox said in Talking 'Bout Ares:
yes, but on like... all games. I've been Muing for almost twenty years and on my original game I STILL cannot remember when commands start with a + or a @.
That's not really your fault. Commands starting with @ are hardcoded and commands starting with + were coded for that specific game so which commands start with which not only changes game to game but also changes within the same game as the coder gets around to implementing their own preferred version of default commands.
What is obvious to you may not be obvious to me and vice versa.
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@roz said in Talking 'Bout Ares:
Newer codebases removing command prefixes is literally the best thing to happen to this hobby in like 20 years.
I will admit that I was dead set against the removal of command prefixes at first, but then I took a very long break from MUSH to work with Evennia, and when I returned, I found them to be terribly frustrating to use, mainly because I kept forgetting to type them. It was enough to make me grit my teeth in frustration and curse whoever it originally was that thought having WHO, who and +who commands on the same game made sense.
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But it doesn't feel like MUSHing if I'm not searching through help, +help, +lhelp, .help...
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@rnmissionrun said in Talking 'Bout Ares:
It was enough to make me grit my teeth in frustration and curse whoever it originally was that thought having WHO, who and +who commands on the same game made sense.
To the best of my knowledge it was not that anyone ever thought it was good to have multiple similarly named commands doing similar things but rather a consequence of trying to maintain softcode compatibility between codebases. So if you wanted to change a command while remaining compatible with any code that uses the old one, you needed to make a new command.
Since Evennia and Ares no longer use softcode, there's no reason to keep commands around for compatibility.
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@roz said in Talking 'Bout Ares:
Newer codebases removing command prefixes is literally the best thing to happen to this hobby in like 20 years.
If I had a nickel for every time I typed out a command back in the day and then slammed my head against my desk because I forgot it was @blah instead of +blah, and/or spent fifteen minutes of frustration searching "help" and then "+help" for the command I wanted but couldn't quite remember, I'd have enough nickel to melt down and recast into a giant statue of a hand extending the middle finger to the entire system.
^_______^
(@_____@)
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@wizz Yeah
+helpversushelpused to be the bane of my life. Especially for 'custom' commands like +aspirations or whatever. -
@arkandel said in Talking 'Bout Ares:
@wizz Yeah
+helpversushelpused to be the bane of my life. Especially for 'custom' commands like +aspirations or whatever.Doesn't help that people also use
newsfor helpfiles. -
@silverfox said in Talking 'Bout Ares:
yes, but on like... all games. I've been Muing for almost twenty years and on my original game I STILL cannot remember when commands start with a + or a @.
Its back when more commands where used not just for RP purposes. Like a game allowing quota and using some extra commands to help build with auto exits being added if folks forgot to add that in. Its so when they go to the next game and they're asking, 'hey how come we don't +digger enabled here' and folks could point out '+ commands are game specific'.
It made more sense when folks had an expectation to help contribute to building and coding the games. Players weren't relegated to just RP'ing there.
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@groth said in Talking 'Bout Ares:
That's not really your fault. Commands starting with @ are hardcoded and commands starting with + were coded for that specific game so which commands start with which not only changes game to game but also changes within the same game as the coder gets around to implementing their own preferred version of default commands.
It's even more complicated than that. On any given Penn game you could have:
WHO and help (no prefix)
@desc (@-prefix for a modifying command)
&attr (for setting an attribute)
+help (for game-specific commands)
rumours (a local command that just happened to not have a prefix)The players literally don't care where the code lives. The prefixes don't help them in the slightest, and can be VERY confusing when there are overlaid commands (help vs +help or @desc vs +desc that do completely different things).
It's just a bad user experience. Full stop. A command line interface is bad enough without adding extra complexity on top of it just to make it easier for the coder to figure out where the code is running from.
