Cybersphere Nostalgia Thread

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Now tell us how you really feel about Shady, @deadculture

He's a little obsessive, to be honest, but he's not a bad guy. He also doesn't PK people who just don't interact with him. There's a lot worse that's been on the game over the years.

Plus? PKing isn't a big deal. Gear and credits mean nothing. You can earn 50-100k credits in a month just half-assing it and puttering around. Dying costs you like... a 2k clone and whatever cheapo gear you happen to have on you.

deadculture

@Admiral I think I said he's cancer. I don't exactly hide my dislike for characters, or people, for that matter, @Admiral.
Although, let me ask you this: does the name SpitMonkey sound familiar to you? Perhaps Atticus? Just curious.

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Spitmonkey is as familiar as other OOC names are for player accounts on the game.

I've known a few Atticus' over the years there. The first one I can remember owned Securitech Apartments a long ass time ago though. I think he played Tremere too, but my memory is a little fuzzy on that.

I'm more familiar with character names than OOC bits. I never really got into the OOC culture of the game.

deadculture

@Admiral Right, SpitMonkey/Atticus/Bleh is sort of infamous in this community as it is over there. He's prone to random ape-outs in which he tries to hit on a girl, gets ditched, then tries to kill people as a result or something like that.

As for Shady not killing people who don't interact with him, that's a bit of downplaying. What you mean is that you can't interact with anything around the 'Shadysphere', in which I case would agree. But, you know, you admitted yourself he's obsessive. And he's obsessive about permakilling anyone he's set on PKing. It's what he does.

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@deadculture Shady's not that guy. He's got his issues, but he's not that guy.

deadculture

@Admiral Maybe not the player, but I am judging the character as such. But that's my experience and ymmv, whatever. Can you expand on the issues you said he has?

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He tends to get overly emotionally invested in his IC relationships and seems to tie some of his self worth to his characters.

To be fair, that's something a lot of people are guilty of. I just don't find the guy to be a 'problem' player. Your experience with him may be totally different.

I don't play there currently, incidentally. So maybe he's taken a turn for the worse in recent months/weeks/years.

deadculture

@Admiral said in Cybersphere Nostalgia Thread:

He tends to get overly emotionally invested in his IC relationships and seems to tie some of his self worth to his characters.

To be fair, that's something a lot of people are guilty of. I just don't find the guy to be a 'problem' player. Your experience with him may be totally different.

I don't play there currently, incidentally. So maybe he's taken a turn for the worse in recent months/weeks/years.

Yeah, I think the problem is more that a lot in the game seemed centered on him. The sole drug dealer, the one person through whom someone has to buy cybernetics from, et cetera. So with so much surrounding him, the 'problem' definitely worsens.

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There's always a few drug dealers and a few cyberdoctors and a few BIG importers. Unless the pbase has just shrunken that much. Which is possible.

deadculture

@Admiral said in Cybersphere Nostalgia Thread:

There's always a few drug dealers and a few cyberdoctors and a few BIG importers. Unless the pbase has just shrunken that much. Which is possible.

http://mudstats.com/World/Cybersphere

Players Connected:
7 (20 hours ago)

Maximum Connected:
15 (last 30 days)
Status:
UP

Version:
MOO

Average Connected:
10 (last 30 days) ▲11%

Minimum Connected:
5 (last 30 days)

With Sindome being thrice as big.

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That's unfortunate, because Sindome is so aggressively boring.

deadculture

@Admiral I would also bet it has less griefers per capita.

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I'd take that bet. And I'd win that bet.

Ghost

@surreality said in Cybersphere Nostalgia Thread:

I was there around... '97 I think?

I was a hopeless clueless newbie and highly dumb. I was Mayor Mike, the six-armed stripper chick that ended up elected when the guy who was always mayor didn't feel like doing it for a term and it was open. I promptly ended up having to leave the game due to RL (my grandmother, who raised me, was dying ) but not before the character got married to someone whose street name she knew -- but not his real name.

She did not realize his name was Edgar Caine, and that she was now...

...Michael Caine.

Sometimes I love this hobby for the accidental hilarious weirdness.

Shouldve had a baby named Myko.

Myko Caine.

My cocaine.

#JOKES

Kanye Qwest

@Ghost
alt text

Ghost

I raise you a cybernetic Morgan Freeman making devil horns with King Diamond. #SoEffingMetal

deadculture

Hog Pit is that way.

Chime

@deadculture said in Cybersphere Nostalgia Thread:

I do think a coder like you could do something really great to update the MOO codebase for Cybersphere/Ghostwheel/etc. Would certainly make launching a new game based on MOO more viable, and perhaps without the cultural pitfalls that the medium seems to have.

@surreality said in Cybersphere Nostalgia Thread:

@Chime We were probably there around the same time.

...and if you ever do something with MOO to make it, well, workable? (As in, there's some hint of a clue how to even get it running... ) Oh, gods, please let me know.

Hm. Hmm!

I had a project I was working on that I tabled because some friends asked me to take a peek at a new game they were helping with that had trouble with codestaff disappearing and needed aid. (That game was later fairly popular, though few probably remember it now. It was called The Reach... cackle, cackle) MY project from before then was SurfaceTension, designed to be a an RP MOO using the Blue Planet rules and setting.

Like many MOOs, it used a from-scratch core and quite a few hardcode changes to make it more mush-like. Spent a lot of time making player:tell() smart enough to render mush-style color codes intelligently on different output platforms (Telnet, xterm256, html, etc) and implement things like NOSPOOF handling (far better than MUSH does). On the hardcode side, I re-did the prefix chars so semi did ;emotes and comma did ,evals. I was just at the point of adding more detailed dict-type support and numerous new moo-language features for things like lambda expressions and the like. ...so yes, I have some vague familiarity with the moo hardcode now.

Was running into moo bytecode speed execution limitations and pondering ways to re-architect that. Also, much like other codebases it was rather strictly singlethreaded-- this was great in the old days but I'd really rather have true multithreading with easy to use composable-STL transactions for clean handling of shared state. These aren't must-haves, but it sure would be nice.

What sorts of MUSH-style features would either of you guys need for actually making a working game with a MOO? IIRC my list that I was targeting was:

Mandatory:

mush-style say/pose/@emit/ooc for IC and OOC rooms (done)
mush-style page (done)
the existence of rooms, as moo doesn't have those in hardcode (done)
the existence of exits, as moo doesn't have those in hardcode

Recommended:

mush-style channels
mush-style @mail
SSL/TLS support
Various things commonly present in SGP, etc

Optional:

mush-style colors (done)
SQL bridge
ticketing system analogous to AJ

Thoughts? Is this the sort of thing anyone actually wants? I mean when I was talking about it before most people were like 'ewww, moo?'

deadculture

I think those mandatory things you mentioned are good. Also simplicity of commands, whereas the code might, say, automatically find a relevant object to reload a gun with, if you give it a name, instead of having to pinpoint which of the six equally named objects it'll take. I guess it's anti-aliasing, the name? Not sure.

And yeah, I would definitely love to run a MOO without the limitations of Lambda as we know them, plus capabilities for automated combat that don't end up lagging the game in a slog (looking at MUX and Firan for that last example).

surreality

@Chime said in Cybersphere Nostalgia Thread:

Thoughts? Is this the sort of thing anyone actually wants? I mean when I was talking about it before most people were like 'ewww, moo?'

Really, truly, very much want. I am Not A Coder, but if there is anything I can do from my end that would help, I would happily do so.

If you want to know what the 'big thing' most people I ever talked to cited as 'why I hate MOO'? You'll probably want to spit.

The lack of MUSH-style %r and %t for linebreak and carriage return. No, really. The MOO substitutions, and specifically the lack of those specific ones, gave people as much grief, apparently, as the command format, and they adapted to the command format better than the substitutions because the substitutions were so innately ingrained.

In my deepest, wildest dreams? Good integration with mediawiki in some form (to and from MOO).

My crazy fantasyland dream involved using mediawiki to set up templates (actual mediawiki templates, not cut and paste layouts) that'd look something like this:

{{Creature
|creature-dbref=#dbref
|creature-name=Guppylicious
|creature-type=Goldfish
|creature-desc=This is a monster-sized goldfish. It wants to eat your soul.
|creature-stat1=5
|creature-stat2=2
|creature-power-telepathy=no
|creature-power-superswim=yes
...etc.
}}

...and the game pulling those stats into an object, and dropping those template values into the object's attributes.

The reason why I pine for this kind of thing is that it can be done with forms in semantic mediawiki -- and that means super quick and easy data entry for creators who are not coders or are unfamiliar with MOO. The forms can have set values to error-proof it to some extent. (It would be pretty easy to keep these in a protected namespace that only staff can edit, too, or on a staff-only secondary wiki install exclusively for data of this type.)

It might even be possible to do a wiki-side chargen through a similar method. This could work with MUX, too, but I am too unfamiliar with SQL and related things to understand HOW to set up the code to pull the right things to the right places in the right directions -- or anywhere at all, actually. It's still way, way beyond me.

It just strikes me as something that would be amazingly helpful for creators and for players, lowering the bar for entry in some respects for true newbies in the hobby.