AresMUSH Updates

faraday

Since 8th Sea opened, I've gotten a number of queries about the status of Ares, so I figured I'd just post something about it.

As far as I'm concerned, Ares is not yet ready to be released. There is code in GitHub, but it's my development sandbox. It's not stable. I make no promises that anything there will be backwards-compatible with what I do tomorrow. In fact, I'm in the process of an experiment right now that completely overhauls the entire web portal.

Kraken and the 8th Sea folks chose to move forward with a public game despite (and fully cognizant of) that instability. Kraken's already had to chuck and redo his code a couple times because of underlying infrastructure changes. It is not a path for the faint of heart, and not one I recommend yet.

But soon. Really, it's in the home stretch. Apart from the web portal overhaul and a few little bugs, the only thing left to do is documentation. So, y'know, people who are not me will actually know how to use it. I consider having a solid foundation of tutorials to be an essential part of the 1.0 release.

Anyone who's interested can follow updates on the website and see the latest release of Ares in action at BSGU.

RnMissionRun

I somehow managed to miss this post until today.

I've actually played with Ares some but I ran into multiple issues installing it, and have so far, not even been able to get it to start. It looks promising, so I'll keep checking for updates.

faraday

@rnmissionrun I accidentally posted it in the opt-in code forum. Arkandel was kind enough to move it so more people could see it.

Having a smooth install process is critical, so I'll be sure that's all settled before 1.0 is released.

Seraphim73

Yeah, we're definitely serving as a sort of beta-test, especially since Faraday hasn't had to work with an Admin team previously, so some things that are coming up for us never came up for her (admin-only comments to requests telling the player who submitted the request that there is new activity when they can't see anything). And yes, we've had some broken-ness that we've had to deal with in being that beta-test, which Fara and Kraken have both been really good about cleaning up as quickly as possible. Definitely worth the trouble, but it has been trouble working with pre-release code (thank you very much to Fara for allowing it).

Lithium

@faraday please code in something that allows null requests to be sent, something akin to @@ in old school MUX so those of us with craptastic IP's can play without being stealth disconnected.

faraday

@lithium there are a variety of keepalive things, including @@.

Lithium

@faraday yay!

ETA: This is the major reason why I can't play on a place like ARX, cuz apparently @@ doesn't work with Evennia and there is nothing similar.

faraday

@lithium It also has idle pinging enabled by default.

http://bsgu.aresmush.com/help/keepalive

Lithium

@faraday My ISP needs it to be something 'sent' from my computer to indicate my port is still active, it's junk, but it's been that way forever. Whenever I try to use standard keep alives it doesn't work and I end up getting stealth disconnected. The only thing that has worked, for me, was sending @@ every 5 minutes or so client side.

Seraphim73

@lithium I actually had to do this a while back too, when I was on Comcast. Pain in the butt.

Lithium

@seraphim73 Yep, Comcast here.

Sparks

@lithium fwiw, a client that supports silent keepalives being sent will work with Evennia and Ares both to stay alive on Comcast links out of box. Basically, the client will send the same invisible keepalive to the game every 60 seconds that the keepalive flag makes the game send to the client.

(I don't know if Potato does it. Atlantis should, and I think Cmud does.)

faraday

@lithium yep understood. In case I wasn’t clear, Ares allows both ways —. @@ (or keepalive or idle ) sent from the client, as well as the server automatically pinging the client (unless you turn it off).

EMDA

@lithium I never thought to test it while I was playing Arx, but Evennia supports a command that's just 'idle' which is a null keepalive. I'd assume it works on Arx too unless they disabled it for some reason.

Roz

@emda It does seem to be accepted without giving any feedback, so doesn't look like it's disabled.

Lithium

@emda Thanks, I'll throw that in and maybe give Arx a try if I get more time.

krmbm

@lithium I used to set up a timer to "page <me>=idler" and then just have SimpleMU gag the "You paged <me> with 'idler'" and "<me> pages: idler".

It wasn't the prettiest solution, but it worked on MOO (which had no @@ equivalent).

skew

@sparks said in AresMUSH Updates:

(I don't know if Potato does it. Atlantis should, and I think Cmud does.)

Potato does. Options -> Configure World -> Connection -> Send null-byte keepalives?

Sparks

@skew said in AresMUSH Updates:

@sparks said in AresMUSH Updates:

(I don't know if Potato does it. Atlantis should, and I think Cmud does.)

Potato does. Options -> Configure World -> Connection -> Send null-byte keepalives?

Yep! That'd be it.

Lithium

@sparks Yep and unfortunately it doesn't work with Comcast.