Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?

[Wolfs]

@collective said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

Usually slowly, badly and with an 'oh, well' attitude towards being bad.

"Sory for al teh typos im on my phon"

[faraday]

@sparks said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

but you have the same information on-game.

Not all of it though. The supplemental profile fields are only available on the web portal, as are the setting/wiki files, etc. Because seriously, double-coding everything is a PITA. The only reason as much of it exists in-game as it does is because there are still so many MUSHers who abjectly refuse to use the web portal at all.

[Sparks]

@faraday said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

@sparks said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

but you have the same information on-game.

Not all of it though. The supplemental profile fields are only available on the web portal, as are the setting/wiki files, etc. Because seriously, double-coding everything is a PITA. The only reason as much of it exists in-game as it does is because there are still so many MUSHers who abjectly refuse to use the web portal at all.

Okay, but that's still within reason. Theme files being on the wiki, for instance, and the novella-length backgrounds and so on. The information that is referenced in both places pulls from the same backing store, which is the key.

[Arkandel]

@thenomain I don't see a reason it would be exclusive to either. The only reason some information can't be available 'live' (which I assume you mean in-game?) is telnet limitations, but otherwise I'd say they should be both derived from the same data, and display as much of it as possible.

[RnMissionRun]

Call me old and stuck in 2003 but I really do think that everything needed to play a game successfully should be accessible from within the game itself. I don't think that you should ever have to leave your MU* client in order to do something on a game. If you do try to make me do this, I'll just go play somewhere else.

Now, if you have some kind of coded system that automatically puts my character's info into your WIKI with no involvement from me (for lazy people who can't be bothered to read my @desc or @bio), go for it. As long as I don't have to mess with it, I could not care less.

[Lithium]

I love me some wiki. I love to practice my wiki-fu skills of stealing other people's templates, and making them look different.

I also /need/ to have access to game information in game all the time.

I am not always connected to a game that can reasonably look at wiki's or webpages, like, my phone.

[Pandora]

@lithium said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

I love me some wiki. I love to practice my wiki-fu skills of stealing other people's templates, and making them look different.

This is my life.

[surreality]

All the <rubs her temples> for you, @Thenomain.

I chose to set things up the way I set things up because... it's the easiest for me to do, the easiest for me to explain to others how to customize on game and on wiki, and easiest to explain to a third party if I ever pass the code along.

It requires a cut and paste of the game code to set it up and a few commands, which isn't super huge.

From there, all they have to do is set up templates on the wiki. (Not layouts. TEMPLATES. Just so that's clear.)

I'd wager more people know how to set up a wiki template -- the pinnacle of not especially hard -- than know how to set up an independent database to maintain and integrate with a wiki and a MUX.

It also doesn't require staff tinkering to add to or work from, or learning more than very basic MUX code and how to set up a proper wiki template. As in, a player could create a template and could use the same basic function to draw info, and format it as they like.

For non-tech-brained people like me, this is helpful. This is doubly helpful if I ever finish it and hand it off, because it means I can actually explain more or less what's going on.

There's some stuff with it I really want to clean/streamline, since it's cobbled together from other things that do additional things I don't need it to be doing for this setup, but really... MUX code and commands are, in the end, variable enough and non-intuitive to enough folks, particularly new folks, that 'you can do everything you need to do to get started on a web-based form like the things you're used to filling out already all the time when you order something from amazon or sign up for hulu' is something I consider helpful. Provided the basic templates and info I planned to set up with it were all they needed? Helpful to new-to-game-creation staff folks, too.

Having had to walk hundreds of characters through CG -- even very simple CG setups -- in the past 6 years or so tells me this is non-trivial.

So while it may not be tech optimal? I think it's probably user-friendly optimal compared to some other options.

All the same: So much

I am still a crazy cat lady, though, there's no denying this. Once I kill this week's migraine and the brain starts to function properly post-travel, I'll try to pull the thing up so it can be poked at.

[Thenomain]

Mega Follow-Up Post! I am burying the lede because I'm responding in order.

--

@faraday said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

This is like a "which do you prefer, chocolate or vanilla" type of question. You're not going to reach any sort of consensus here.

Well yeah, this is Soapbox. I am, however, getting this conversation out of the X-Men Utopia thread. It comes up from time to time, so let's get our opinions in order.

Personally, I prefer to have the wiki/website be the primary source of all information, and have in-game commands for essential quick reference. But that matters to anyone else about as much as the fact that I like chocolate (i.e. it doesn't matter at all except insofar as what you'll find on my games or ready-built into Ares).

This is my opinion too, but what I consider "essential quick reference" changes. Being able to pull information into both is my perfect world.

--

@sparks said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

My answer is 'both should draw from the same source'.

Sure, but when I say it I have Faraday calling it vanilla v. chocolate. Also, I may be hungry right now.

--

@arkandel said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

@thenomain I don't see a reason it would be exclusive to either.

Because this is how @Ganymede phrased it in the X-Men Utopia thread. I will concede to @Tempest that it's not that hard to list and review a bunch of stats on a wiki, but my complaint as stated is that hitting the wiki just for some information is disruptive and/or tedious, as agreed upon by: Ghost, Ixokai, and Apos,

Most people agree that both sources is best. This includes myself. Actually, I think Ganymede in the other thread is the only person I can think of in recent memory who thinks we should dump in-game "finger" style information altogether. Or sheet. Whatever.

I mean, that's not to say that mob rules, but I certainly think people are happier with a mix of both.

--

@surreality said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

All the <rubs her temples> for you, @Thenomain.

For non-tech-brained people like me

You can make MediaWiki do things that absolutely baffle me. That takes a hell of a lot of technical skill. Don't sell yourself short. Making things easy is hella hard.

[Ganymede]

@thenomain said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

Most people agree that both sources is best. This includes myself. Actually, I think Ganymede in the other thread is the only person I can think of in recent memory who thinks we should dump in-game "finger" style information altogether. Or sheet. Whatever.

I didn't say that at all, man. Don't put words in my mouth. Be fair. I first said:

It would be neat if the application to make a PC were just to make up the wiki with a sheet on it.

And then I said:

What I meant was: it would be neat if all you had to do was make a wiki page. You know, just do that, and bamph, character.

And then I said, to you:

M1963 uses descriptions for powers, skills, etc. You could easily put that into a wiki. Injecting that information onto the game is not necessary as long as you have access to the wiki. Sort of redundant, really.

I said nothing about not having a finger-style information. What I was saying or suggesting was that, if a game has a wiki, that players could be approved based on what was on their wiki. And that you didn't need to have some sort of code to inject the wiki information into the game information. I agree that this may seem onerous to folks.

That's it.

Again, just keeping the record straight here. I said nothing about removing +finger or +sheets or any of that.

[Thenomain]

@ganymede said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

Again, just keeping the record straight here. I said nothing about removing +finger or +sheets or any of that.

Well...fine then. See if I invite you to the "misinterpretation dance" this year. I think they said this year? Or did they say it should be put into gear? Nnngh, maybe I heard them wrong, dammit.

[Ganymede]

@thenomain said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

Well...fine then. See if I invite you to the "misinterpretation dance" this year. I think they said this year? Or did they say it should be put into gear? Nnngh, maybe I heard them wrong, dammit.

It was the Miss Interpretation dance, which was in May.

[faraday]

@thenomain said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

Actually, I think Ganymede in the other thread is the only person I can think of in recent memory who thinks we should dump in-game "finger" style information altogether. Or sheet. Whatever.

Just blame me for that instead of @Ganymede, because I do think that. I also think we should dump telnet and play the whole dang game on the web. But that's neither here nor there.

Coding the same thing twice (once for web, once for game) is frustrating, error-prone, maintenance-heavy, and at some level IMHO just insane. This is 2017 and the web is ubiquitous. Expecting people to use it does not seem like an impossibly high barrier to entry for a game.

BUT I know it is. So I coded both ways for a lot of things in Ares, even though I hated every minute of it.

[surreality]

@thenomain I will poke about the things later in the week on skype or such. There are some ideas.

I suspect that between the two of us, we could figure out a 'clean pull' for what I want this thing to be doing, which would be easier to pass along independently.

The MUX side code to do that is presently way beyond me -- since I'm working off of Glitch's function which was added to your news/+help code, which I tweaked some, which was based on Chime's... which... uh, that can probably be simplified some and might be wise to do. (For instance, I don't need the category stuff for sorting/etc., and it's likely making more work than is needed.) It works, but it's likely doing much more work than it needs to be doing, and while I can live with that, I wouldn't want to pass it along to others like that.

(There's a lot of SGP I want to rip out, too; it's at the 'start a new core' level if I try to transfer things over clean. Hence the 'nnngh, I know I should, it would be neutral tinkerbait, I need a not-serious-businesses commercial project, and... yeah, but but but augh-so-much-all-the-things and migraines.')

[ThatGuyThere]

My vote is definitely on game if I can't find it on the game I will likely just forget about it and move on or make up my on info as needed.
I an fine with it being a both thing but I am not a wiki person, never will be. I crap out pages for the characters because it is pretty much a requirement these days but they never get updated.

[mietze]

I think basics should always be available in game. But wikis are a nice supplement to add more depth if desired.

It's very frustrating to be in a household with teens (it means my bandwidth slows to a crawl) and all I want to know is someone's fucking last name that I forgot, so I can address them properly, and instead of everything being available in +finger or +info I have to wait for everything on a wiki page to load.

[Roz]

@mietze I'm a huge huge wiki fan and will always be on the side of wikis, but, like -- are there really games where even basic info like someone's last name isn't included in a +finger or +sheet? That is dumb. Even I won't argue for that.

[faraday]

@roz said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

Even I won't argue for that.

Yeah even a wiki zealot like me wouldn't argue for that. That's what I was getting at when I mentioned "essential game info" being in-game. To expand on that thought - my bar is things that you may want to look up while in the middle of a scene.

For example, Ares has a whois <name> command that tells you their full name (including rank and callsign) and lets you look people up by first name, last name, or callsign. 90% of the time you don't need the whole spammy finger-style profile, it's just the clunky way we've gotten used to for figuring out "who is this person again?".

[mietze]

@roz usually on the games I play you can't see other people's +sheet, so that's not much help.

And I am always shocked at people who don't fill out a full name field or even worse, put in a name that nobody would know because it's not the one they use in their ic real world, and their name is some cute nickname.

Supremely irritating.

[mietze]

@faraday exactly. People should not have to look up a multi-screen spamfest to just get a damn last name/rank/title ffs.