Web-based MU poll

Arkandel

@faraday I think a good bet for you could be to find the most basic but robust open source platform that does something similar - say, a chat client with a decently expandable architecture - and build on it. It'd probably save you a ton of time, and frankly a barebones interface doesn't require everything to be written from scratch. That might even be a reason to have a web project.

For example you could write your own +jobs code... but why not just skin and hook into an existing simple ticket system? There are a whole lot out there, refined and fully developed.

faraday

@Arkandel said in Web-based MU poll:

For example you could write your own +jobs code... but why not just skin and hook into an existing simple ticket system? There are a whole lot out there, refined and fully developed.

Well that's actually an interesting point that I've been thinking a lot about. I mean, when you look at the sort of ancillary systems that make up a MU, they all already exist in web form...

BBS --> forums like this one
Channels / Pages --> discord or a similar chat program
Jobs -> any number of existing ticket systems
Events -> online calendars
Wiki -> MW or wikidot

But do you really want to go around and create 6 different accounts and visit 6 different links just to manage your game?

@ghost - Yeah licensing is definitely something to consider.

Arkandel

@faraday said in Web-based MU poll:

But do you really want to go around and create 6 different accounts and visit 6 different links just to manage your game?

No, that'd be insane! But you can hook your game into them automagically. For example when you create a character in game use the forum's API to create an account under the same name there, do the same for the ticket system, etc... all of that should be transparent for users. Then as long as they are all skinned the same way it'd look very similar. A player would only need log on once, and they'd be able to access all of them.

Sure, the interfaces won't be exactly the same but damn... the difference in time, effort and features between developing your own systems to using an already robust platform is enormous. It also lets you focus on developing the RPG portions.

faraday

@Arkandel Not all of them support that sort of integration, though. And as a player, do you really want to go hopping around to all these different websites to do things for the game, or do you want it all to be in one place?

Arkandel

@faraday said in Web-based MU poll:

@Arkandel Not all of them support that sort of integration, though. And as a player, do you really want to go hopping around to all these different websites to do things for the game, or do you want it all to be in one place?

You can hack the ones you don't, or pick them for it. It's not like there's a shortage of options.

For players... it depends. For example I'd rather boards opened in a new tab anyway because it won't be messing up my scene - I can have it running and work on a ticket at the same time without one spamming the other. The reason we traditionally mix every output in one window in MU* is because we literally have no choice due to telnet's limitations.

Glitch

@Arkandel I think you're entirely underestimating the amount of work it would take to integrate those things in a mostly seamless manner.

Sparks

As someone who has had the misfortune to use Invision Board/Mediawiki integration tools, that's a ball of pain I never want to experience again. If one of the arguments is "setting up PennMUSH or MUX2 is too hard", then I think forcing someone to deal with that enormous ball of Nope is not going to improve the situation.

Further, you'd really need the database to be shared, or else when someone gives up a feature character you have to go and rename the forum account, etc. And when someone gets banned—and this is MU*ing, sooner or later someone will get banned—you have to ban them from the main site, from the wiki, from the forums, from the ticket system, from the Slack or Discord you're using in lieu of comsys...

If we want a smooth, easily-maintained, easily-configured system, having it all self-contained is better. Having it as a thing that's pre-hosted so you can go 'click' and make a game—like people setting up a new site on Wikia, for instance—would be best of all.

ThatGuyThere

As someone who voted no I will share my perspective. It is not so much a love for the client since I really don't care about that but I multi-game while I tend to stick to one scene at a time I often have multiple games open chatting and what not.
So a new game that is only available on the web is a huge barrier to entry for me because while it is on the web I still have to have my client open for the others. True I usually have a browser open any way but it frequently goes without being looked at for rather long stretches.

Tat

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Web-based MU poll:

One of the things I like about my MU client actually is the sense of separation, weirdly enough. I generally play with Firefox open and a bunch of tabs going but I can also...not. I can just cut myself off a bit, like I do when I'm playing any other sort of video game, and open nothing but the client. It's kind of nice and feels less busy.

I'm not sure if this is what @Monogram is talking about and I can certainly just use my browser for less BS at any given time. This is one of those things that's the fault of the user rather than the fault of the thing itself. But it is one of those ephemeral things that makes me rather like having a separate piece of software that I play on, even if I recognize that clients are alienating to newbs.

ETA: That said, I'm still excited about the idea of a game that's entirely web-based. It feels like the way forward and absolutely would cut down the barrier for entry that's keeping new players out of the hobby. I'm just trying to put my finger on why I like my MU client, in addition to all the centralization for real-time RP stuff I think telnet games do quite well.

This is pretty much where I am. I am SUPER excited to leave telnet games and their limitations and their frustrations behind. That doesn't necessarily mean I'd love RPing in a browser all the time. I have too much going on and I'd inevitably lose things.

But there are lots and lots of web apps that also have their own stand-alone client. Being web-based doesn't HAVE to mean everything lives in a browser. Think Slack, or Spotify, or Pandora. You can use their web client, or you can download their dedicated application and run it that way. That's what would be the ideal end-game to me.

The primary benefit of moving to something web-based, in my opinion, is the ease with which you can start playing AND, hopefully, the ease with which you can build a game. Forum games are insanely popular because all you need to run one is an idea and the ability to write some text. It'd be great if we could get even close to that easy for a basic M* game.

surreality

@faraday said in Web-based MU poll:

This would be a MU* style of play, but completely designed and optimized for the web - a sort of Frankenstein mashup of Slack/Discord live chat interface and a MU* game wiki.

I would suggest dev for mediawiki on this rather than tying it to wikidot. I know that is unlikely due to the preference there, but it means hosting anywhere is viable, which can be super relevant.

If you went that route, I'm happy to share stuff I have that might be handy and am willing to poke ideas to help foster that kind of environment from the wiki side where/if possible.

Arkandel

@Glitch said in Web-based MU poll:

@Arkandel I think you're entirely underestimating the amount of work it would take to integrate those things in a mostly seamless manner.

Oh I'm not saying it's easy or fast. Just that it's a smaller project than duplicating anywhere near the featureset... for a certain range of mostly seamless.

faraday

@surreality said in Web-based MU poll:

If you went that route, I'm happy to share stuff I have that might be handy and am willing to poke ideas to help foster that kind of environment from the wiki side where/if possible.

Thanks. I tend to be in the same camp with @Sparks, though, in thinking that trying to interconnect a half-dozen different web apps (forum, wiki, chat, tickets, events) with the RP engine is just... Nope. APIs have all sorts of limitations (when they exist at all, which is less often than you might hope) and trying to tie into the database directly is varying degrees of nasty.

At the end of the day it comes down to setting and meeting expectations. If people come to a web-MU* - are they really expecting nodeBB levels of forum features, or just Web-Myrddin? Do you really need to reinvent Discord or just provide something on par with MU* chat channels? I don't actually know the answer.

Edit to add... For example, people seem to be reasonably content with Arx's website even though it's not a wiki. Most MU*s, I think, don't utilize wiki features so much as they just need a website that's tied in with the DB.

Miss Demeanor

@faraday I wouldn't say they're content with the wiki... given that they felt it necessary to make their own wiki, since the one provided didn't meet the needs of the players.

As far as web-based MUing... so far as I know, there's no way to spawn anything into a web-based MU* window. Which means EVERYTHING will spawn directly into your main window. There's a reason I've only ever used two clients, and it took my external hd dying before I was willing to leave SimpleMU behind for Potato.

Spawn windows are the only thing that keep me sane in MUing, the ability to separate out my pages, ooc chatter, channels, etc. into separate tabs is invaluable. I willingly gave up the 256 ansi colors for years simply because SimpleMU still has, hands down, the simplest spawn window set up. I was able to get a decent 'how to' for setting them up on Potato, but it still doesn't address some of the issues I run into with pages. I don't care about log cleaning, that's relatively easy to do by hand. Keeping up with a big scene while people are nattering on in OOC, channels are active, and pages are getting tossed about? Priceless.

faraday

@Miss-Demeanor said in Web-based MU poll:

@faraday I wouldn't say they're content with the wiki... given that they felt it necessary to make their own wiki, since the one provided didn't meet the needs of the players.

Oh did they? I didn't know that. (I don't play there, just chat with folks who do.) Curious what needs it didn't meet.

Sparks

@faraday said in Web-based MU poll:

@Miss-Demeanor said in Web-based MU poll:

@faraday I wouldn't say they're content with the wiki... given that they felt it necessary to make their own wiki, since the one provided didn't meet the needs of the players.

Oh did they? I didn't know that. (I don't play there, just chat with folks who do.) Curious what needs it didn't meet.

Inability to add pages as players, mostly.

Arx has the Evennia webserver set up to show dynamically generated character profile pages, organization pages, to automatically log public events (and also store logs of private events you can view if you were invited to or attended that event), and so on. You can view a lot of the help topics and other theme right there on the website as well.

However, other than the journals, there's really no way for players to edit content there. Want to write a guide on "How to use the +task system?" Can't do that. Want to make a reference page for public knowledge on a given historical event (like the Tragedy at Sanctum, or the Battle of the Night's Grove)? Nope. Want to write up random additional player content like, for instance, "A Comparative Summary of the Types of Cheese Found in the Lyceum"? Also nope.

That's where a wiki comes in handy: you have much more freedom for guides and other pages beyond what just the staff want to write.

Coin

I'm with @Tat. If you're gonna do it, do it all the way.

I have zero coding/programing/whatever experience/knowledge, or I would offer help. But a dedicated app that function as its own browser and client would be amazing.

I mean, it's also by far the most work intensive and what not, but it's also, I think the next logical stage for our hobby. I know we've been howling about how MUs are dying for like a decade in a half now, but at some point we need to admit that at some point, it will die.

Also, @faraday, you might want to look at and talk to the people of Wanton Wicked whom I believe have their own, custom-coded chat and charsheet interface, among other things.

Roz

@Sparks said in Web-based MU poll:

@faraday said in Web-based MU poll:

@Miss-Demeanor said in Web-based MU poll:

@faraday I wouldn't say they're content with the wiki... given that they felt it necessary to make their own wiki, since the one provided didn't meet the needs of the players.

Oh did they? I didn't know that. (I don't play there, just chat with folks who do.) Curious what needs it didn't meet.

Inability to add pages as players, mostly.

Arx has the Evennia webserver set up to show dynamically generated character profile pages, organization pages, to automatically log public events (and also store logs of private events you can view if you were invited to or attended that event), and so on. You can view a lot of the help topics and other theme right there on the website as well.

However, other than the journals, there's really no way for players to edit content there. Want to write a guide on "How to use the +task system?" Can't do that. Want to make a reference page for public knowledge on a given historical event (like the Tragedy at Sanctum, or the Battle of the Night's Grove)? Nope. Want to write up random additional player content like, for instance, "A Comparative Summary of the Types of Cheese Found in the Lyceum"? Also nope.

That's where a wiki comes in handy: you have much more freedom for guides and other pages beyond what just the staff want to write.

As one of the folks who made the player wiki, this is generally correct. We wanted to be able to host player-written guides for systems and whatnot. But also, I wanted to take advantage of Semantic MediaWiki to build out dynamic data relationships between different items. I know these relationships exist within the Arx code, but the website isn't set up everywhere to sort of easily traverse between them. Like: if you're on the org page for a noble house, there's no easy clicking through to their liege lord or their vassals on the Arx website. We set up stuff like that on the player wiki.

The other big thing that at the time wasn't available that we did is set up public journals in a way that could be easily searched. This is, thankfully, redundant now, as Arx added this to their website officially and it's great. But before, there was no way to just -- go look at one character's journals, or look at journals about a specific character, etc.

And another benefit was just, uh. Searching capability in general. Which the Evennia website build doesn't have, and Arx hasn't tried to add itself yet. (My understanding is that it's a lot more intensive than anyone would like to think.)

surreality

@Roz It's things like this that make me wonder if some of this couldn't be done as extensions to mediawiki in some form. As in, it's probably possible? But I wouldn't know where to begin.

Roz

@surreality I'm not sure what you mean? The stuff I was describing was all done in MW. It just doesn't come in Evennia's website package.

faraday

@surreality said in Web-based MU poll:

@Roz It's things like this that make me wonder if some of this couldn't be done as extensions to mediawiki in some form. As in, it's probably possible? But I wouldn't know where to begin.

I think that's the rub. With the proper know-how you could certainly tie together all these different systems and get things working. But it would be a lot of work and it would probably be fragile as the different tools change (because they weren't really designed to work together).

A centralized system would be one-stop shopping for everything you need to run a game, but it couldn't possibly do any one particular thing as good as its specialized tool counterpart. It has a wiki, but not as fancy as MediaWiki. It has forums, but not as fancy as MSB. Is that good enough? I dunno. Given that a lot of games are settling for +jobs and +bbs and +events, I'm thinking the bar isn't terribly high on those three systems in particular. With a wiki the bar is higher because people are used to it.