Do you use spawns and how?
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I went with the closest to what I do, which is for high volume staff windows only, usually. Mostly because I'm lazy about setting it up. But you can bet job spam got spawned off on the TR staff window, that's for dang sure, along with monitor clutter.
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I used a spawn once but I can't remember why. Oth wise I don't use them, not even while staffing. I either can pay attention or I can't, and if I can't then I turn off the channels. If something critical happens when I'm off channel then people would either page or mail me.
For some reason, Skype is my best spawn window.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@Thenomain said:
I either can pay attention or I can't,
For me, it's not about being able to pay attention to stuff, it's about threading conversations (so to speak). I have an easier time following stuff that way. I tend to go off of channels I have spawns set up for if I can't pay attention though, so I can totally get this.
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I too have tried spawns. For whatever reason, my brain just cannot seem to attend to them. I'm not sure why. (This may be why I also struggle with/rarely try to multiscene unless one person truly doesn't mind prompting me and/or wants a very very very slooooooooooooooooooow scene. I do have some favorite people who due to work/otherstuff pose in the 30-40+ minute range). Someone was very super sweet and walked me through setting up spawns on potato and it was a disaster because I totally lost channels and ooc communication for the night.
Maybe this is an acquired taste thing though, and if I trained myself to "see" it better it would be helpful. In theory I love the idea. In practice I think my brain is scattered enough that separating things out futher just isn't helpful to me. I do however really love and make use of name/phrase highlighting.
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I use CMUD, which I KNOW but it is from when I played on MUDs and it is excellent for setting up spawn windows and if there are any other functions I need from a client I don't know what they are and I don't want to know so don't tell me. I have a nice little set of rectangles on the right of my screen with my pages and my channels and my main screen is all rp. (Or the helper channels and the stuff I am working on if it is my staffbit) and it is visually organized and great.
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When I was super active on Shadowrun: Denver, I had my main alt have all the major channels to one window, all the pages to another window, and then the main RP/OOC/minor channel window.
This was back when I used SimpleMU. I have moved on to MushClient, and while I know how to make spawns for it (or rather, have the code sitting somewhere), I haven't gone all out to do so yet. If there was a way to organize it like Atlantis (which I used in the long-past days of school, as music major (like all art stuff) damn near required a Mac), I'd probably code up the spawns again.
The issue with MushClient is that spawns aren't an easy thing to make. You have to create a separate world and do some code shenanigans to pull it off.
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There isn't really one for my option, either. For the most part, I spawn things into a single window a'la Roz's screenshot (which will surprise no one given that I wrote the client in question).
But as background, each spawn in Roz's screenshot could be pulled out and dropped on the desktop to make a new window, or dropped into another Atlantis window to dock it there. Further, for windows with a single spawn, you can collapse the list entirely if you choose.
So, during GM'd plots or such I will often take the plot or group-scene channel—the ones used to keep OOC chatter to a minimum on most games I'm on—and rip the appropriate spawn out of the main window, turning it into its own standalone window and collapsing it down smaller beside the main one, so I can see GM chatter without having it clutter up my main RP window AND without having to switch spawns to read it.
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@Glitch said:
@Roz I'm just floored at the number of spawns you've got going. It does look easy to read and understand at a glance, but man... isn't there a lot of clicking involved, going back and forth between all of those?
I should add to Roz's comment that you can bind a hotkey sequence to any individual spawn in Atlantis. So I not only can use the default 'move to next spawn with activity' key, but I can have keys to move me to specific oft-used spawns (or the main spawn for a given world) without having to click.
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...I need to take notes on all of those things. I already
Atlantis so much more than Savitar (which I had used for many years, and I'm slow to change what I'm used to using), things that make it even more handy I'm always eager to learn.I wouldn't have even tried to set up the limited spawn use I did if I didn't have Atlantis; it was completely opaque if if was even possible in Savitar.
Oh fucking well.
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@surreality said:
...I need to take notes on all of those things. I already
Atlantis so much more than Savitar (which I had used for many years, and I'm slow to change what I'm used to using), things that make it even more handy I'm always eager to learn.I wouldn't have even tried to set up the limited spawn use I did if I didn't have Atlantis; it was completely opaque if if was even possible in Savitar.
This makes me sad because Savitar is such a cool name.
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@surreality If you're interested I have an Atlantis client guide I wrote a while back for newcomers to the client/clients in general. You might already know everything there, but just in case!
EDIT: Since writing that guide several years ago I have realized I can group all of my highlights in one line with the "matches regexp" option and | between names. I'm smart.
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@mietze said:
I too have tried spawns. For whatever reason, my brain just cannot seem to attend to them. I'm not sure why. (This may be why I also struggle with/rarely try to multiscene unless one person truly doesn't mind prompting me and/or wants a very very very slooooooooooooooooooow scene. I do have some favorite people who due to work/otherstuff pose in the 30-40+ minute range). Someone was very super sweet and walked me through setting up spawns on potato and it was a disaster because I totally lost channels and ooc communication for the night.
Maybe this is an acquired taste thing though, and if I trained myself to "see" it better it would be helpful. In theory I love the idea. In practice I think my brain is scattered enough that separating things out futher just isn't helpful to me. I do however really love and make use of name/phrase highlighting.
This is also the reason that I don't use them. For some reason, I just work better with a thousand different things in front of me all sort of cluttered into one monstrous pile that my brain somehow parses into something elegant and beautiful. I didn't even use spawns when staffing, but I think the two-windows thing helped to at least keep that somewhat organized.
For instance, when researching, I will never have just one book open at a time. I will have like, eighteen, all stacked on the desk (probably open), working my way through the threads of the thing I'm following. I couldn't do it one book at a time, like some of my friends. They like, have all their shit on the shelf and just go to it when they need it.
How does that even work?
Edit because Mietze is not Ganymede, and for some reason I thought I quoted Gany.
