The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?

[Apos]

@moonman said in [The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?]

My instincts tell me it's time to face the music: Telnet is on its way out, and with it, MU*'s. It is the Internet equivalent of AM radio, except less relevant. If I were to start a roleplaying community today, I would make a Discord server, because I'm convinced people actually use that program for now. I wouldn't create a new instance of RhostMUSH, and I wouldn't write my own custom codebase, for fear that the command line would scare off perfectly sane, intelligent, capable, fun roleplayers. Clicking on things is just more straightforward to people. It's more comprehensible and frankly a superior interface to memorizing a thousand ad hoc commands. I love MU*'s and they will always have a special place in my memories but I think it's time for us to admit it: we lost the argument, this medium is going to die with us in our nursing homes, at the latest.

So, this thread is here to raise the question if I am right, and depending on the answer to the question:

• If I am wrong, how can we get the vast swath of roleplayers to join existing MU*'s and create their own?
• If I am right, what platform should we jump ships to?
• Should we even jump ships, or accept our fall into extreme RP obscurity?

On one hand, I agree telnet is a massive limiting factor and the hobby is intimidating and hard to join. Ares and Evennia are trying to make it much easier, but until they get to the point of having something plug and play that's extremely easy to setup, and transition to more of a web game with minimizing the archaic command line and using a mouse more, those problems are going to remain. It's not intuitive and very difficult for new people, and as a niche hobby there's an awful lot more resistance to trying to attract new people than I would expect. I'm relatively new to the hobby myself, but I remember clearly how offputting I found aspects of the medium, and I had to work at it to find things about it I really liked that I don't think are easy to duplicate out of it. So on one hand, sure, I think you are right.

On the other hand, how many players do you want?

It sounds like a silly statement but it's not. It is a lot of work to make a good game, but if you -do- make one, odds are strong that you'll have more players than you can really handle. Like if you're running a sandbox with full automation, you probably have no upper bound, but that's not really where MUs are strong as a medium. If you are trying to create a MU where the hobby really shines, with running a persistent world that supports a lot of interconnected roleplay, how on earth can staff coordinate 25,000 people without having some sprawling pyramid staff structure with like 5 levels of GMs? And that number isn't absurd, roleplaying communities are hitting in the tens of thousands, just not MUs.

It's extremely attractive to combine the intimacy of personalized GMing with the ability to involve a character in any number of persistent stories. That's a strong draw, and most new people that try out the medium find it really appealing. But it is incredibly labor intensive. I intentionally haven't advertised on big RP sites outside of the hobby because it would be impossible to support an influx of people and would just do them a disservice.

Dropping a sandbox and telling people to play amongst themselves offers no meaningful benefits over any other RP medium. GMing for them and making their actions matter in a persistent world does. But the setup and maintaining that right now is arduous, and until that becomes way easier and less time consuming, I don't even know if more players would help as much as it would seem.

[surreality]

@rook said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

I dunno if I should continue participating, as I am immediately (by my second post in this thread) coming back to the same 'arguments' and questions that I posted and came to in the other thread.

I am kinda in the same boat here.

I'm also trying to tinker with my thing again, and really? Not up for the hand-wringing and doom-saying and wish-listing.

I just know I'm working on something I think is kinda cool. I may need some help eventually, I may be able to figure most of it it out myself eventually, somehow. It is rather a lot of work, though, so I'd really rather step out on this kind of discussion for a while, because these discussions are not often inspiring any longer, they're incredibly demoralizing rehashes of the same hand-wringing, doom-saying, and wish-listing.

That said, want a real, simple suggestion for MUX/MUSH/etc.?

Set up a /me <pose> alias or command. This is one of those commands that exists in some form in a variety of messengers and so on that a lot of folks are used to from daily non-gaming life.

Currently, this requires both code and aliasing within the client software (in my case, Atlantis), and that is a pain the ass. (I managed to do it once, but probably not well and I couldn't tell you what I had to do in the client to make it work, as I don't remember.)

But, really. There you go, one wee hurdle taken out of the way that opens up access to a lot of people already accustomed to text mediums with immediacy.

(And how many times have all of us been skyping and then try to /me a pose in a game window? Yeah, I didn't think that was just me.)

[Aria]

Sooooo, ummm.....

What you guys are discussing MUSHing evolving into? It was quit literally what I started in. Back in the late 90s, White Wolf ran official text-based RPGs on their privately owned servers as a means of marketing their game lines, including World of Darkness, Exalted, and I believe -- though I didn't play it -- Ravenloft. They were run through a program called DigiChat, which was a Java-based chat program you logged into from a web-interface. It had far, far less coded in capabilities. +bboards were usually handled as email groups. +sheets were created using drop-down menus and text boxes, stored in a MySQL database, and spit back onto the website using PHP after they were approved. The diceroller? HTML. But literally everything else was clickable, and accessed through the chat program -- rooms, logins, profiles, private message boxes, etc.

The DigiChat program itself was very expensive to license, meaning new games were extraordinarily rare, unlike how many MUs seem to exist. Eventually, it crapped out and was replaced by AddOn Chat.

I played on those games for a solid ten years before I ever tried a MUSH -- at the invitation of.... I think she goes by Sonder on FC now, actually.

There's several sites still running like this and I can send links to anyone who really wants them, if you want to see how they work. But most of them have many of the same problems as MUSHes do, and a whole host of other problems all their own.

[Arkandel]

@rook said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

People are getting personally offended by the voicing of opinions, so it seems much less a technical discussion than it is a preference discussion. I have tried to guide both of these threads into some sort of technical planning/dreaming/design direction, and each time people have apparently taken offense.

I don't think it's that bad. We can be passionate in all things, but it's not like anyone's going FUCK YOU while stating their preference, so that's fine.

There are however two issues here:

1. We don't really have a proper example of a telnet-less MUSH at the moment so any criticism of that is premature. Judging its potential by other web games which aren't even trying to do something similar to how a MUSH does things is flawed.

2. It's possible the first example of a web MUSH we eventually see won't be very good. It might simply lack features (and it probably will on Day One compared to codebases which have taken decades to evolve), or the implementation might just suck... but it could paint expectations either way based on its shortcomings rather than its strengths.

And if you don't mind guys, a personal note at the end... it's expected that people will stick to what they know. We're a conservative bunch, and highly critical as things go. There's no way there won't be 'ohnothisiswrong' complaints no matter what is actually done, or (as @surreality has correctly sighed over at times) even over anything that's considered.

That places a higher onus on developers here. Not only do people need to be good with code but they need an extra thick skin to handle all these gripes without wondering too much why they're doing all this extra work for what sometimes seems like an unappreciative community. This is not the case. We are far from unappreciative. It's just that some voices bitch louder than many others praise.

[Griatch]

@rnmissionrun said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

Evennia has been around for 11 years. I would hardly call that 'young'.

People have been putzing around with it for 11 years, yet it's still on a 0.7 beta release and the first real games only seem to have hit in 2016. @Griatch can comment on its status further, but as far as I can tell it's very much still in development.

I would personally say that while the Evennia codebase is 11 years now, it was a very different thing initially. In its current recognizable form it has been around for something like 7 years or so. It's certainly possible to make production-ready games with it (as Arx exemplifies) but it's still very much in active development. As for the version number we didn't even have a versioning scheme until two years back or so, so we've been pretty slow with increasing those. I would like to see more advanced web integration before we move up to something like v1.0.

ETA: Ares, incidentally, is also 11 years old. I started fiddling around with it back in 2006. And it's not done either.

I didn't know that. But it does go to show how much work is involved in things like this and how long time it takes when development only happens in one's free time.
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Griatch

[faraday]

@surreality said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

Set up a /me <pose> alias or command.

I just added this to Ares for you, though it doesn't work in Atlantis because Atlantis sucks up anything that starts with '/' apparently.

@aria said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

It was quit literally what I started in.

Not really. I mean you said it yourself - it had far less coded capabilities, email groups instead of boards, licensing fees, proprietary system, etc. That is worlds different than a modern web app with everything you currently have in a MUSH reborn in a free, open-source and extensible codebase.

@arkandel said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

That places a higher onus on developers here. Not only do people need to be good with code but they need an extra thick skin to handle all these gripes without wondering too much why they're doing all this extra work for what sometimes seems like an unappreciative community.

Given that the current state of affairs leads potential game-runners to "Step 1: Do you have a coder", I would turn that back and ask why the community really wants to put more onus on the coders. I'm not saying it has to be all rainbows and sunshine, but man... it's really hard to keep swimming upstream against a constant tidal wave of negativity.

[surreality]

@faraday ...I am spamming the world's largest reply ever to Ark, but had to totally pause and scrap that post just to at you for this.

If I can find the thing in Atlantis I set to let that slip through, I'll post it. If you nudge @Sparks, she may be able to put that in as one of the exceptions or similar in later builds? Hopefully. I really do think it's genuinely one of those 'little things that helps'.

[Arkandel]

@faraday said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

Given that the current state of affairs leads potential game-runners to "Step 1: Do you have a coder", I would turn that back and ask why the community really wants to put more onus on the coders. I'm not saying it has to be all rainbows and sunshine, but man... it's really hard to keep swimming upstream against a constant tidal wave of negativity.

I've no answers for you. If it helps though it's the same as anyone who steps up to do stuff we all need; PrP runners get bitched at, staff are routinely considered corrupt, strikingly handsome forum admins are told they suck, it's just how it is.

But if it helps, those are only the loud voices - and my unsubstantiated claim is that many of those haven't even MUSHed for some time. Most people just go by their day to day routines enjoying themselves and they're quite glad to see things being done for them; those are the ones you're actually working for.

If it helps.

[Griatch]

The discussion of Telnet vs the world is old. From the server-developer's perspective telnet itself is easy to work with. You can even add encryption to make it secure. From the server's perspective the problem is the inconsistencies on the client side. The MUD-extensions to telnet (GMCP/MSSP/MSDP etc) are described in various online documents but there are no "official" standards or agreements apart from what the biggest games/clients once implemented. Going to a web interface when one controls both the server and the client is a very appealing prospect.

(Coincidentally, if anyone's interested in using /me <pose> in an Evennia game, you can enter the following (assuming the game didn't remove Evennia's default nick command):

nick /me $1 = pose $1

Henceforth, /me smiles is the same as doing pose smiles. )

[Arkandel]

@griatch I think the issue here is that some clients handle command lines starting with / as internal commands instead of sending them as-is. Or that's my understanding - nothing done on the server side can fix that.

[surreality]

@arkandel said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

@rook said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

People are getting personally offended by the voicing of opinions, so it seems much less a technical discussion than it is a preference discussion. I have tried to guide both of these threads into some sort of technical planning/dreaming/design direction, and each time people have apparently taken offense.

I don't think it's that bad. We can be passionate in all things, but it's not like anyone's going FUCK YOU while stating their preference, so that's fine.

Bluntly, that's not good enough. There's a reason I keep asking for a wholly constructive dev-specific forum where the bullshit behavior is reined in, and the bullshit behavior isn't just people flinging 'FUCK YOU' around. In fact, there have been plenty of instances in which someone acting like a giant asshat in a constructive discussion probably should be told 'FUCK YOU' and then roundly ignored thereafter to allow the discussion to continue in a productive fashion.

(Tangent: y'know what would kick ass? An 'ignore <poster>'s comments in this thread' option that isn't a straight-up ignore. There are some folks wholly awesome some places, who are walking disaster zones when it comes to specific subjects. /end tangent.)

There are however two issues here:

1. We don't really have a proper example of a telnet-less MUSH at the moment so any criticism of that is premature. Judging its potential by other web games which aren't even trying to do something similar to how a MUSH does things is flawed.

Ares is close, and it's very nicely done on the whole from what I have seen. I have not tinkered with the web interface because I like my MUX client and have things color-coded to visually separate them out conceptually/etc. to help my ADD brain cope with and sort the data flood properly.

And if you don't mind guys, a personal note at the end... it's expected that people will stick to what they know. We're a conservative bunch, and highly critical as things go. There's no way there won't be 'ohnothisiswrong' complaints no matter what is actually done, or (as @surreality has correctly sighed over at times) even over anything that's considered.

I don't think it's wrong to consider -- or attempt -- all of these things. Web interfaces, web integration, Ares, Evennia, etc. The doomsaying exists on all sides: "We'll all die unless... " can end with "...we stick to what we know!" or "...we change dramatically!"

Some reasonable design points surface in these discussions. All of them take advanced knowledge to implement, even if it's only partial implementation. And it's very clear that partial implementation is just not fucking good enough for some stompy feet, and bluntly, that's where a rousing round of 'FUCK YOU' is well-deserved and in fact the appropriate answer.

This hobby has come a long way, no matter how 'dated' it is. Every step along that way was, typically, a small step. It was not a quantum leap; it was a partial implementation that grew and evolved until it became something far more feature-rich and elaborate. Every time somebody shits all over a partial implementation or new direction someone is interested in exploring because it's not the quantum leap they asked Santa for when they were five, there's good reason I wish Santa would give them that pony they asked for that same year so it could kick them right in the fucking head, because this attitude is so egregiously ignorant of the reality of 'how things actually work' that it displays a sincerely galling measure of entitlement, selfishness, and brazen stupidity.

That places a higher onus on developers here. Not only do people need to be good with code but they need an extra thick skin to handle all these gripes without wondering too much why they're doing all this extra work for what sometimes seems like an unappreciative community. This is not the case. We are far from unappreciative. It's just that some voices bitch louder than many others praise.

No, I'm afraid it really isn't just that. I'd like to think it is? But it isn't. There was a time I would have agreed, but that time has long since passed.

There are... three people, I think? Who have seen the stuff I've actively been working on. One's not even on the forum. It's not going to get posted to the forum, either, until I'm done with the things I want to do with it and they're working how I want them to be. Would there be times that input would be helpful? Probably -- but the input generated here lately, even in the constructive areas, is far too full of the doom-saying, hand-wringing, and spoiled-child wish-listing for me to consider it worth my while to filter through all of that wretched chaff in search of wheat.

That chaff is demoralizing as hell, and it is not just a case of 'grow a thicker skin'. It is a lot of goddamned work, and it takes real positive energy and the ability to hope that it will make things at least just a little better in order to even attempt one of these things.

You can have an armadillo hide, and still have all of those necessary resources of positivity and faith in what you're doing sapped away from you fast by all of that bullshit, because it's exhausting and pointless, and soon enough, you're exhausted and the whole thing seems pointless, too.

People sure loved to mock me for dropping my project early in the year after -- in the constructive section -- it got attacked with both barrels and I got attacked personally in genuinely disgusting ways. They still do it, and it's very clear they very much enjoy doing it. That? That's what the thick skin is for: recognizing those people for what they are and blowing them off, ignoring them, and soldiering the hell on in (generic) your ass-kicking combat boots. (Mine are NewRocks, motherfuckers. Don't mess with the wedding boots! Ahem.)

Now, I can tell you this much. That I wasn't able to handle:

• people who apparently can't follow clearly-worded directions to save their lives
• think they're exceptions
• don't respect the actual question asked even in the form of the barest lip service from post one
• make statements that are demonstrably false as evidence that the sky is definitely going to fall
• sling around personal attacks in a space not remotely appropriate for that
• make fun of someone because they like different themes than the person doing the mocking
  ...did tell me: this is not the time I should be working on this project, it's something that's important to me, and because it's something that matters to me, this shit is stressing me out rather than chilling me out.

I put that shit down to save for a later time when I could deal with those things more effectively, because it was clear that no one felt the majority of those behaviors were wrong. (It's not what I'm working on now, either.) After all, what is the first thing we tell someone in this hobby when shit's going badly or RL is stressful? "Take a step back, recognize you're not in the right mindset for this right now, and come back to it later." But boy, howdy, do we love making fun of somebody for actually doing that, and that's spectacularly shitty, too. I get mocked for choosing to shelve it 'til later, too, still, despite the fact that this is absolutely the correct response -- people just really seem to enjoy interpreting it in ways that are deliberately intended to be as hurtful or harmful and insulting as possible.

That, in itself, should be eye-opening. Every single one of those behaviors, had it happened on a game, would show up in the Peeves thread as demonstrative of shitty behavior, and rightly fucking so, and we would all be piling on to talk about how shitty that behavior is.

So, no, 'thin-skinned developers' are not the fucking problem.

Please wake up to this one, because the struggle is real, man.

[Aria]

@faraday said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

@aria said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

It was quit literally what I started in.

Not really. I mean you said it yourself - it had far less coded capabilities, email groups instead of boards, licensing fees, proprietary system, etc. That is worlds different than a modern web app with everything you currently have in a MUSH reborn in a free, open-source and extensible codebase.

I also said that was how those games were run in the late 90s. The proprietary system that was run has since died and been replaced. Wikis have been integrated, and usually set up with templates that populate very easily with information entered in by the player. The email groups have all been ported over to forums, and on many of them, characters have individual threads viewable by the appropriate GMs/STs, which function as a long-term record for a player of every request that they've ever made, stored and searchable for as long as the game is up and running. (If there's one thing I miss from those games, it's that. It's very much that.) Many games also use the forums to now store sheets, removing the need for a MySQL database.

Their great failing is that they have no coded in combat system, so most anything involving mechanical resolution is done the same way it's done around a gaming table -- just with people arguing rules interpretations via text, instead of verbally.

But all in all? They're much easier for a clueless new RPer to stumble into using than a MUSH, because there's nothing to learn. If you can use a chatroom and type in a forum, you can play on these games. The biggest 'barrier' is editing your wiki page, and that's... pretty much it.

[Sparks]

@arkandel said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

@griatch I think the issue here is that some clients handle command lines starting with / as internal commands instead of sending them as-is. Or that's my understanding - nothing done on the server side can fix that.

Yeah, Atlantis—like TinyFugue—passes / lines to a command/macro parser. I could make it so that instead of a "No such command" in the current for unknown commands it passes it on to the game, or I could just add /me as an internal command aliased to "pose".

[surreality]

@sparks That one really would be super helpful if it could be put in as a preset. So many people use that in a variety of chat/messenger/etc. things that it really is pretty handy.

[Ganymede]

@surreality said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

So, no, 'thin-skinned developers' are not the fucking problem.

Very true.

Recognizing that everyone's human is a problem.

It shouldn't be, but it is.

[Alzie]

@surreality The loudest ones usually don't understand what you're doing anyways, but it's certainly not conducive to any of the developers 'give a fuck' rating if everyone keeps telling us how little they want it. Hope the project goes well.

Regarding this talk of the next version of Mu, however, what do you want out of the interface? Everyone keeps clamoring for the removal of telnet. Fine, but you're just replacing that with something else. If not telnet, it will be some other form of server-client communication. Maybe you do that through HTTP Requests, Maybe you make your own protocol (Relevant XKCD), Maybe you do it by email, Maybe you do it by wikis or forums or Maybe you just decide to do it by database queries (Relevant XKCD).

We're all talking about eliminating the data source, but that has nothing to do with the interface. People wanted HTML in Telnet, so pueblo exists. People wanted sound in Telnet, so we came up with ways to do that (IRC used a protocol command, Muds had MSP). People wanted really involved GUIs with Graphics and what not, so they made entire GUI Clients (see Batmud Client, or the many plugins for Mushclient that create GUIs for games).

So we change to another data source, the popular idea so far seeming to be a database backed RESTful front end, but what do you actually want out of that interface? What should it do differently? It's still only going to have text to display to you. How should the text look differently? Yeah, we can do some better things with CG that way, but we could do the same things with telnet and pueblo.

I'm not the old man on the corner telling everyone not to advance, but maybe we should actually talk about what we want out of the advancement? At least a semi-clear goal.

[surreality]

@ganymede My Ganymede interpreter is not working well this week, so I'm gonna ask for clarification there.

(I can't tell if that's a snark re: 'the developers are stupid for not just blowing this off because this is standard human bullshit even though we recognize elsewhere this is damaging and harmful bullshit people shouldn't do', or reinforcement re: 'people need to remember that developers are people and contain their abusive horseshit'.)

@alzie said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

@surreality The loudest ones usually don't understand what you're doing anyways, but it's certainly not conducive to any of the developers 'give a fuck' rating if everyone keeps telling us how little they want it. Hope the project goes well.

^ This. And 'give a fuck' actually is the most vital resource. People can learn various forms of code if properly motivated; you can't learn 'give a fuck', and this kind of thing is a strong demotivator to those who would have to learn the code.

ETA: I think a lot of the problem is making something cross-platform. Most of the stuff you describe was all Windows-only, and there actually are a fair number of us mac users out here.

[Griatch]

@arkandel said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

@griatch I think the issue here is that some clients handle command lines starting with / as internal commands instead of sending them as-is. Or that's my understanding - nothing done on the server side can fix that.

I didn't interpret that as being the main gist of it, but fair enough. You can indeed not do anything about that on the server side. My post was about the inconsistency in client behavior and why this means telnet is a problem compared to web solutions where you control the client as well as the server. So I guess that still fits.

(An evennia-specific example of this problem is the tintin++ client which will interpret the semi-colon ; as a new client command, not caring that it's also the Python continuation symbol useful when running Python statements in-game. Luckily tintin++ has a verbatim mode to ignore all such special inputs but most new tintin users will trip up on that at least once).
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Griatch

[faraday]

@alzie said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

So we change to another data source, the popular idea so far seeming to be a database backed RESTful front end, but what do you actually want out of that interface? What should it do differently? It's still only going to have text to display to you. How should the text look differently? Yeah, we can do some better things with CG that way, but we could do the same things with telnet and pueblo.

A short list? I want, in no particular order...

• A GUI, so I don't have to remember/type obscure command-line syntaxes just to do everyday stuff.
• Standard text formatting like bold and italics and links.
• To edit a pose after I've posed it, like you can in any other forum or text chat program.
• Graphics embedded in descs and character profiles.
• An integrated MUSH and wiki so you don't have to update your wiki page when in-game data changes.
• To configure a game without /grabbing attributes in obscure formats off of obscure objects.
• To code in a normal programming language, not line-by-line interpreted commands pasted into a telnet client.
• To play with a decent experience from a web browser, when I'm not at my normal computer. (Which oh-by-the-way also works for new players who haven't downloaded a MU client.)

I could go on, but I'll stop there because isn't that reason enough?

A few of those things you can do crappily over telnet (witness pueblo, which never caught on because it was non-standard and clunky as heck), but most of them you just flat-out can't.

[surreality]

@faraday The sad thing is, so much of that can be done in mediawiki... except the chat part.

When some day I win the lottery, 'pay someone to develop an extension that does this (and handles dicerolls) effectively' is very high on the dream list.

For a play-by-post/more forum-style game, it's possible already. You can basically set a log template with a feature to add 'poses' (which can be edited as needed, formatted, images, etc.) But. I don't think that's been tried before and while I'm gonna try it as an option on ProjektX, I don't know if people will take to it or not. (Pages also don't auto-refresh, so that complicates matters further; there'd need to be some purge-action integrated and I'm not sure that's 'there yet'.)