Better Places Code

[Arkandel]

@ixokai said in Better Places Code:

I'm still betting on: you can't make it better. You're reinventing rooms.

That's a brave statement! Can't is quite a thing to say - and how would it be proven either way? What's objectively better ?

And if reinventing rooms leads to a solution why is that a bad thing?

[ixokai]

@Arkandel said in Better Places Code:

@ixokai said in Better Places Code:

I'm still betting on: you can't make it better. You're reinventing rooms.

That's a brave statement! Can't is quite a thing to say - and how would it be proven either way? What's objectively better ?

And if reinventing rooms leads to a solution why is that a bad thing?

Sigh. Why do people not read the front stuff and only read the back stuff.

I'm still betting on: you can't make it better. You're reinventing rooms.

The front stuff was the important part.

Maybe I don't win the bet and am proven wrong. It happens, you know.

[Arkandel]

@ixokai Sure, but how would you be proven wrong? That was my objection. It's not like there's an objective way to say approach <X> is better than <Y>.

</nitpick>

[Thenomain]

@ixokai said in Better Places Code:

Sigh. Why do people not read the front stuff and only read the back stuff.

Note: When you later in this thread misinterpret someone else's thought process, I'm going to derail this thread to remind you that you said this. In the meantime, this is just a bookmark to remind myself later. Kthx.

[ixokai]

@Arkandel said in Better Places Code:

@ixokai Sure, but how would you be proven wrong? That was my objection. It's not like there's an objective way to say approach <X> is better than <Y>.

</nitpick>

Yeah. No. I'm not talking about this with you anymore.

[SG]

I'm thinking something like this.

You could have the tables be an object. When you sit at a table, you enter the object and are given the following commands:

Observe: toggles lets you see poses away from your table, that are emitted to the room outside the object. If you don't want to pay attention to outside stuff, you toggle it off and you only see your table.

Quiet: toggles you quiet so your poses only go to your table and obeserving or people not at the table people can't listen in.

When people pose at their table, it emits to the room unless they're being specifically quiet. If people are seated elsewhere and are set !observe they don't see the spam.

Or something like that, I'm not a programmer.

[faraday]

@ixokai said in Better Places Code:

Yeah, that's not so bad. But does it actually improve anything? The scene will still be spammy and hard to follow if its got a bunch of people in it.

Personally I find it less hard to follow when I can pick out things that apply to me. I can skim the other conversations to make sure nobody's on fire, but pay more attention to the stuff in my corner of the room to respond to it.

Currently the only way I have to do that is setting up a client-side trigger to highlight stuff with my name in it. Which is great until someone says, "Joe nods back to the annoying girl..." and I totally miss his response.

I'm still betting on: you can't make it better. You're reinventing rooms.

I'll take the bet, but hey - I could be wrong

Unrelated aside, I share @Thenomain's hatred of phone code. WHY?

[ixokai]

@faraday said in Better Places Code:

Unrelated aside, I share @Thenomain's hatred of phone code. WHY?

On this we agree.

[Thenomain]

@faraday

Because immersion.

Because that's why 'knock' code. Because that's why radio code. Because it's nice to have a simple thing to type (pp thenomain=You jerk!) that also engages people in the room with you.

I've coded some of those horrible systems where it remembers phone numbers, would ring to someone's home if they didn't have a cell, people could disguise their voices, and all of that needs to die in a fire. But the simple system to create 'bob is on the phone laughing his ass off' speaks strongly to some players.

That's why I do it. Under duress in this case, but I feel my job as coder is to support the game. Engaging players is supporting the game at the highest level, even higher than making staff's job easier.

[Ide]

@faraday said in Better Places Code:

@Arkandel I was less concerned with cutting spam than I was with organizing the spam, to make it easier to pick out the bits that are relevant to you. [....]

I would love to see a client which automatically folded poses from places/clusters you weren't in and you could expand them as needed.

Also on the UI side, an input box that changed depending on what you prefix your text with, like \, tt, ", whatever.

This is sort of doable in mushclient now. Maybe a plugin is in order...

[faraday]

@Thenomain said in Better Places Code:

@faraday

Because immersion.

Yeah, I get it - and I've coded some of that stuff too. It just still grates on me at some basic level.

[Thenomain]

@faraday said in Better Places Code:

@Thenomain said in Better Places Code:

@faraday

Because immersion.

Yeah, I get it - and I've coded some of that stuff too. It just still grates on me at some basic level.

Yeah, because it's dumb. Rassafrasssin' fragram narramfgrrrrr.

[Bobotron]

@faraday
I find that I've only used places on one Superhero game I played on, and I rewrote (well, okay, wrote from scratch using the concepts of it) something for my own use (I was going to use it at my WoD game), and simplified it greatly. I thought people would get a fair bit of use out of it; I may share it (I'll probably have to remove functions that are specific to the way I code, and it's also for Penn so it might have some stuff that won't work on MUX).

The big thing it did, when you're at a place and using the command it prefixes to your place as [Place] to everyone at that place, and only the people at the place could see what was going on using the tt command. It also had a working purger for when people left the room, disconnected or otherwise left a place without using the depart command. But you could pose as normal to the room, and room poses would be visible as normal. It was meant to reflect 'and we're all chilling here, talking amongst ourselves so that others can't hear'.

Here's a way that it displayed, and the +help, which I thought was pretty straightforward. If anyone wants a copy, I'm willing to decomp it and throw it up somewhere.

[Thenomain]

Place Pose Thoughts:

"" Say
:: Pose
;; The other kind of pose
|| Emit
<double backtic> OOC

Your finger's there anyway. Tap it twice.

This last one could look like: ``:grumbles.

Yeah, I'd probably screw this up all the time too, but I'd like to give it a go.

[surreality]

I like the color coded thing someone mentioned above. Not as much in the 'it's showing to the whole room' context, but the idea that you could rapidly and easily separate 'at your place' from 'in the main room' is still quite helpful, I'd think.

[Thenomain]

Passed on from @Chime : Change the at-table prefix to something easier to parse. In her words, "it should be an obviously OOC tag indicating that the following pose had limited-targets"

This has halfway been mentioned, but this change even if the pose is place-only.

[by the fountain] Thenomain does his theno-things.

[surreality]

@Thenomain You could have that, and perhaps [privately by the fountain] depending on whether the pose is announced to the whole room or not.

Having some kind of distinction between what is seen privately and what is seen by the whole room is very useful -- but I really like that tagged-no-matter-what permutation as it keeps the space of the location in mind and makes it immediately (and repeatedly if necessary) apparent.

[ThatGuyThere]

@ixokai And the other Phone code discussers.
I kinda like phone code that is simple such as +call Person, cause it lets me have a conversation over the phone with out then having to Emit the same thing again to the room I am in. I ma lazy like that.
However +phone code that makes me try to remember a number can go right to dying in fire. We don't need to remember real numbers anymore for the most part if your game tries to make me you are bad and should feel bad.

On the actual topic of Places code, I would only bother using it if it was hidden from the room. Not because of any privacy issues but because of the spam reduction factor. If there are eight people in a room and I still get 8 peoples worth of spam I am out of there place code making the part I care about stand out more or not.

[Whirlwind]

I know that when I fiddled with places code at one point, a thing I added was so that if you put angle brackets <around something>, that'd end up as a general emit (like if you did +mutter and those things happened to pass through). That way, if it were a setup where you're waving your arms around while talking, doing some elaborate pantomime that a bystander might figure out (but somehow talking quietly enough that it wouldn't leave the place), you could cover that without having to do a 'for everyone else' pose.

I thought it was a charming idea, since it wasn't mandatory and was instead an added little, "If you want to make it a bit more funky" thing; if I recall, nobody used it.

+Phones, I only really like for calling a place, in case you want to get someone in that room, but you don't care who you get (but you also don't want to mass-page everyone to work out who'd answer the phone). Alas, this means folks setting up if their room can be called (EG: Moe's Bar? Yes. Count Dooky's Secret Chapterhouse? Not so much), which few folks want to do.

[Thenomain]

@Whirlwind

#1) Hey, Whirlwind.

#2) If it's on the Directory, the location can be called? Eh, it seems like a cheap solution, but an easy one.