UX: It's time for The Talk

[faraday]

@Sparks said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

I really think something developers writing games nowadays should do where possible is make a standardized, generic UI library. A standardized method of headers, of footers, etc.

I dunno... in my experience the headers/footers are one of the first things people want to customize when they take my stock codebase and make their own game with it. I don't really see how this will help - especially when dealing with such vastly different codebases.

[SparklesTheClown]

@Ganymede I've yet to join a WoD game that actually abstracted everything in such a way, though it's not like I join them very often, so maybe I just haven't seen the ones that do this. At best the ones I've played abstract skills and attributes. Though when I played Reach, I barely used the code, so I can't remember how they did things there.

Either way, as I said, I'm not particularly invested in WoD, but Faraday asked for examples, so I gave examples of the types of things I see as needing improvement.

[Thenomain]

Responding because I was quasi-summoned:

@Ganymede said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

I don't even know what you're getting on when it comes to a CoD game. Is it so tough to ask the other player for their Defense, and then typing +roll Strength+Brawl-Defense?

My roll code includes a system called 'action'. It's essentially a macro system, and it works like this:

&action.box me=/again=9 strength + brawl
+action box - defense

No, WoD/CoD is not set up for every instance (though we're trying) because many situations are...situational. Muds and For-Online RPG Systems have the luxury of tailoring everything around the code. PnP RPG Systems do not. It's possible to come up with solutions, but it does take the time that Muds (et al.) are spending on making a system from scratch.

Tomayto, tomahto.

[Ganymede]

@HelloProject said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

Either way, as I said, I'm not particularly invested in WoD, but Faraday asked for examples, so I gave examples of the types of things I see as needing improvement.

You mean, things you've seen. Because things have changed, apparently.

Again, changes are being made. Constantly.

[Thenomain]

I've been away for a few days. Sorry for the double-post.

@faraday said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@Sparks said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

I really think something developers writing games nowadays should do where possible is make a standardized, generic UI library. A standardized method of headers, of footers, etc.

I dunno... in my experience the headers/footers are one of the first things people want to customize when they take my stock codebase and make their own game with it. I don't really see how this will help - especially when dealing with such vastly different codebases.

All Mush-likes should have three soft-coded functions:

header()
footer()
divider()

Then all a game has to do is change it in one place. Hell, Evennia or other Mud-likes should probably have these as constants in some generic file, because goddamn Muds are all over the place for formatting.

A standard that can be tweaked for personality, IMO, the best kind of standard.

[Rook]

To be fair, MUDs are very, very simplistic.

It is a straight (Weapon+Effects) vs (Armor+Effects) mechanic check, there are no situational modifiers. No terrain, no cover, no concealment, no taking-your-time-on-the-shot type modifiers exist in most MUDs.

So yeah, 'attack troll' works just fine. Your attack vs his defense. Subtract HP. Done.

In a MUSH scene, code cannot account for Troll being ducked behind a concrete half-wall and getting defense bonuses from that. Nor can it "tell" that you moved in your pose this round, thus you have a negative modifier to your hit roll. Or that in the last scene, your armor was doused in acid and structurally compromised. STs and players take account of those "small details", and thus a coded +attack is hard to do without lots and lots and lots of that switch/option cruft that you are saying is making things complex.

Try coding a combat system in a MUSH that takes THOSE things into account. I dare you.

[faraday]

@Rook said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

Try coding a combat system in a MUSH that takes THOSE things into account. I dare you.

Uh.... FS3? Cover, movement stances... okay it doesn't do acid directly but it does factor in armor.

[Rook]

Quiet you. I'm making a point here!

[faraday]

@Rook TGG did it too. But to be fair - I think these systems would be what is being described as "complex" here. Because yeah, they take a lot into account. You can combat/attack troll but you can also combat/attack Troll=Bob/called:head,burst to have the troll fire a burst at Bob's head. Complicated features are complicated, yo.

[Bobotron]

@Rook
Movement aside, everything else is just 'effects' to put into play, insofar as code is concerned. Cover mechanics, reduced armor, increased/decreased anything...

[SparklesTheClown]

@Rook said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

To be fair, MUDs are very, very simplistic.

It is a straight (Weapon+Effects) vs (Armor+Effects) mechanic check, there are no situational modifiers. No terrain, no cover, no concealment, no taking-your-time-on-the-shot type modifiers exist in most MUDs.

So yeah, 'attack troll' works just fine. Your attack vs his defense. Subtract HP. Done.

In a MUSH scene, code cannot account for Troll being ducked behind a concrete half-wall and getting defense bonuses from that. Nor can it "tell" that you moved in your pose this round, thus you have a negative modifier to your hit roll. Or that in the last scene, your armor was doused in acid and structurally compromised. STs and players take account of those "small details", and thus a coded +attack is hard to do without lots and lots and lots of that switch/option cruft that you are saying is making things complex.

Try coding a combat system in a MUSH that takes THOSE things into account. I dare you.

But this is exactly how some MUDs have worked 0_o. Like, I have seen literally all of this in a MUD at some point.

I feel like this thread has proven to me that you guys have played some terrible MUDs.

Though I no longer play MUDs for the same reason I no longer play MMORPGs.

@Ganymede Yes, things I've seen. She asked me to give examples of the types of things that I would consider to be a problem, I wasn't saying "here is a comprehensive list of things that bother me". If that was the case, WoD stuff would be the furthest from the list, since I barely play tabletop MUs in general anymore (primarily due to the lack of D&D or Pathfinder MUs).

[Sparks]

@faraday said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@Sparks said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

I really think something developers writing games nowadays should do where possible is make a standardized, generic UI library. A standardized method of headers, of footers, etc.

I dunno... in my experience the headers/footers are one of the first things people want to customize when they take my stock codebase and make their own game with it. I don't really see how this will help - especially when dealing with such vastly different codebases.

Ah... sorry, I should clarify. The coder on a given game should make a standardized UI library for that game.

I.e., if I take AresMUSH and make, I dunno, SecretMUSH based around the general setting of The Secret World, I-as-coder should make an effort to provide a library that standardizes the UX.

I'm not saying you with Ares or Griatch with Evennia should provide wholly standardized UX that everyone should stick to because, yes, you're right, gutting it and replacing it (or ignoring it outright) would be the first thing about half of the staffers out there did.

[Rook]

The point here being that all of this complexity is doable, but it results in complex command strings that have to be input by the player.

In most MUSHes, the players add up all the modifiers OOCly and just add it to the roll. It's easier for them to do that than get the command string right!

[SparklesTheClown]

@Rook I feel like most players would know what they're adding together though. Like, even though I'm shit-tier at WoD, I generally know what my stuff is even if I don't usually remember all the numbers.

Is it usually the reverse and I'm just weird?

edit: Also you mean in most WoD MUSHes.

[Derp]

@HelloProject said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@Rook I feel like most players would know what they're adding together though. Like, even though I'm shit-tier at WoD, I generally know what my stuff is even if I don't usually remember all the numbers.

Is it usually the reverse and I'm just weird?

edit: Also you mean in most WoD MUSHes.

So, like... I'm still not sure what you're wanting here. You seem to be asking for a lack of complexity, but what I'm seeing is that generally you don't want to have to go look up stats and stuff.

But that's not what these command systems are -for-. These games aren't being created so that you never have to buy / read the books and can just do the thing. They're not video games. They're tools so that people who have already read the books and know the source material can come together and play online.

How would it be different at a tabletop if you didn't remember that striking looks 2 gives you a +1, and Striking Looks 4 gives you a +2? You'd still have to go look those things up. These coded systems are in place basically to help you use what you should already know. For a roll command ,the simplest version would be +roll stuff, and then if you have 9-again or whatever you count those and +roll stuff again, until you're done rolling. We do create some shortcuts to make it faster, but those shortcuts don't negate your need for the materials. Most games out there specifically say that you need to both own and be familiar with the materials presented. And that's not just WoD. That's DnD. Pathfinder. Exalted. Superhero games. Whatever. If they're using custom material, they still pretty much insist that you be familiar with the material.

So is your idea of 'simplicity' such that you... won't ever have to go look in a book again? Because that's pretty much not gonna happen. Ever. We can try and streamline the tools out there to let you put stuff in faster, but no system can ever negate entirely the need for the human brain.

[SparklesTheClown]

To be honest, I think the disconnect here is that I'm using WoD examples so that WoD people will understand me more, but that's kind of confining the entire context to WoD.

I'm not entirely sure if there's a way around that. Maybe this just isn't a MSB discussion?

[faraday]

@HelloProject FWIW, I don't disagree with your general point that MUSH UX can be improved. What I'm having trouble with is how you think it should be improved.

You've mentioned macros - okay, @Thenomain says his code has them, Ares has them. I don't think anyone disagrees about macros being useful.

You've mentioned simplifying rolls with abstracting commands - okay, but various people have explained why that's a conscious design choice in all the examples you've cited. Either for situational flexibility (i.e. not having to code up everything under the sun) or for copyright reasons (not being able to completely replace the rulebooks).

You've mentioned systems being different on different games (like +myjobs) but, well, frankly that's just never going to change. With the MU community fragmented as it is, you can't expect every game to have the same command set.

You've mentioned "complicated syntax" but the examples cited (rolls, mail) you don't seem to have a problem with specifically. So... I'm just really not sure what you're talking about there.

We've talked about softcode/hardcode commands and prefixes, but until you replace the old platforms, there's nothing to be done about that.

What's left?

[SparklesTheClown]

@faraday To be honest, I'm finding it very difficult to actually discuss this because I have to kind of confine the discussion to one narrow section of the hobby that I barely even play in. Like, I'm trying to discuss this in a way that people can actually engage, but I feel like it's not quite working.

I feel like it'll be much easier to re-contextualize my original point:

I'm addressing the entire hobby, not one part of the hobby. Like, good, you're trying to simplify stuff, but the point is that there is no single way in which UX shit can be improved. How it differs or how it's shitty differs dramatically from game to game.

We've pretty much already narrowed down and discussed the kinds of things that are problems, and that's what I want. How you identify things that are UX problems is not going to be the same in every game or in every area of the hobby, which is why I've tried to give a wide variety of examples of the types of things I see as bad design.

But no single one of us can actually fix those things, the only way to fix that kind of thing is to keep it in mind as a community. If some MU coder who doesn't normally read MSB comes across this thread and can apply the stuff we've discussed to their code and the games they're coding, that is the point.

Essentially this thread has the general purpose that the VASpider thread does, except for shitty design practices.

If you're doing good, then fine, keep doing good. But just because you're doing good, or just because multiple people within one narrow area of the hobby are doing good, doesn't mean that the discussion doesn't need to happen and that other people in the hobby can't benefit from talking about this.

My intent wasn't to create a glorified WoD code discussion and about how I want to fix WoD, because, again, I don't care about WoD that much. The entire point of the thread was my general point.

If you agree, good, that is the point, keep doing that.

[faraday]

@HelloProject Well I don't play WoD either so those examples don't matter much to me anyway. But I think when you make a thread with the vague assertions in the vein of "MUD coders rule, MUSH coders drool" and then fail to provide any specific, actionable examples of how you think things could/should be improved, it kinda undermines your point quite a bit.

[Derp]

So, about the only 'universal' things that we can really talk about are the things that @faraday mention above, things that we've actually discussed earlier in the thread. So let my try and make a more generalized point here.

Simplicity is not always your friend. There is a point at which there has to be a learning curve with these games, because what may seem extremely un-intuitive at first glance is actually pretty damn handy.

Let's look at the help system, for instance, as an example. Every MU type game comes prebaked with a set of hardcoded commands and functions. These can be found under the header 'help'. For every flavor of MU*, these files are universal. I know that if I go to a MUX, there will be a 'page' command. I can use @emit to post things to the world. Etc.

But then there are these pesky +commands, and +help. Wtf is that about? Why can't we put our +drive command, found under +help, under 'help drive'? By god, that would make it easier, right?

Except, no. It wouldn't. In fact, it would create complications. What if I go to another game, and try to 'Drive <somewhere>'. The game tells me 'huh?' Well, what kind of jank shit is this? It worked on this other game. Why is it not working here? 'help drive' gives me nothing. And when I type 'help', it pulls up a list of stuff that I've never even seen before. Jesus, now I have to navigate a whole new help index.

So... what if there were a way to distinguish commands that we add (+) through softcode from other commands that just come pre-baked with these systems? We know how the pre-baked commands work, we just need to know how the new stuff works. It could even have its own additional (+) help system, to keep it cleaner.

And that's what I'm talking about, here. On the one hand, yeah, sure, it seems pretty counterintuitive to someone looking at it for the first time, but to anyone who's been around a while? That is nicely packaged, and pretty intuitive. Because there's a learning curve that is pretty much necessary for these systems to function well.

Just like video games. Many video games are not point and click, or whatever. Tekken is one of my favorite games. Sure, at first it seems simple. I hit this one button and it does this thing, I hit another and it does another thing. And really that's all I need know, if I'm patient and lucky and masochistic af. But man can I really make that baby sing with that ten-hit combo whose formula requires three lines on the TV to follow.

So there has to be a line, somewhere, and across these kinds of games, stuff like that does tend to be that line. It requires some investment to learn how these things work, but just because it seems confusing at first doesn't mean that it's not the best way to do it, either. It's not 'shitty design', it's pretty damn handy. But it also takes practice.