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

[Thenomain]

@sparks

I mean that someone needs to code that wiki, that coding a character stat system and coding a wiki are very different skillsets.

We very clearly want and I strongly believe that we need a change to the way we code our games, but I don't think simply changing input methods is going to be enough. We need support, probably more support, which makes the OP's goal of having a new game crop up because he wants more options harder to accomplish.

This may not be true, but we'd also have to change what we expect in a game.

[ThatGuyThere]

I think a lot of the rancor by myself and others is some of the we must move forward stuff involved a direct repudiation of what we like about the hobby. For example in Faraday's list of wants:

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

• A GUI, so I don't have to remember/type obscure command-line syntaxes just to do everyday stuff.
• Graphics embedded in descs and character profiles.

While that might draw people for me it would send me running, the last thing I want in my RP is a bunch of images, and in general dislike Graphical UIs. So if my choices are the hobby dying or evolving into something I do not what to play exactly what reason would I have to prefer either side?

[Deleted]

I think just moving over to web-based interfaces would be all the hobby needs.

People don't want to download a program and then connect through ports and blahblah.

They want to click a website. Click click. Done.

[Ashen-Shugar]

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

I think just moving over to web-based interfaces would be all the hobby needs.

People don't want to download a program and then connect through ports and blahblah.

They want to click a website. Click click. Done.

I think Polk is using the Rhost API to do exactly that.

Essentially driving the entirety of the game as a an entirely web driven interface.

I believe Rook may be looking to do something similar.

I also saw backspam of the, well, spam, in debugging mush code.

It's why I went to such lengths to add debug labels, color-coded grepping, and match algos galore to the debug output.

It's not an IDE by any stretch of the imagination, but it actually makes trace output worthwhile and not walking into a vomit contest by a pair of trolls.

Ixokai can cover more on the @label goodness as he's actively used it in several projects. I just coded it. I mean, use it as well? Hah!

This all does go to what I've said a few times. Empower the user to use what tools they find easiest, and you'll find a greater amount of adaptation.

[Thenomain]

@ashen-shugar said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

This all does go to what I've said a few times. Empower the user to use what tools they find easiest, and you'll find a greater amount of adaptation.

Which is why I added you to my list of current projects as open to change as Evennia and Ares, which are taking variations of the ground-up approach. Because choice is good. Good choice is better.

[faraday]

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

I think a lot of the rancor by myself and others is some of the we must move forward stuff involved a direct repudiation of what we like about the hobby.

If the thing you like about the hobby is having to type +bbpost Board=Subject/Message then yeah, I can't help you. Keep playing Penn/Tiny I guess.

But other than that, I don't see how making it easier to do things people are already trying to do is a repudiation of anyone. Nobody in this thread is talking about radically changing the fundamental style of gameplay. Folks already link to their character profile images from +finger or @desc. They already insert image links into room descs. Don't want to see them? Hey, that's a perfectly fine feature request, which is already common in some chat clients.

[Ashen-Shugar]

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

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

I think a lot of the rancor by myself and others is some of the we must move forward stuff involved a direct repudiation of what we like about the hobby.

If the thing you like about the hobby is having to type +bbpost Board=Subject/Message then yeah, I can't help you. Keep playing Penn/Tiny I guess.

But other than that, I don't see how making it easier to do things people are already trying to do is a repudiation of anyone. Nobody in this thread is talking about radically changing the fundamental style of gameplay. Folks already link to their character profile images from +finger or @desc. They already insert image links into room descs. Don't want to see them? Hey, that's a perfectly fine feature request, which is already common in some chat clients.

@Faraday, that's something that you, @Griatch, myself and others have faced and will continue to face. The evil face of change.

A larger portion than normal just hear the following:

So, I have this new feature that changes WOOF WOOF BOW WOW MOO MOO OINK OINK OINK WOOF WOOF WOOF. So what do you all think?

Anything after the word 'changes' they tend to tune out.

[ThatGuyThere]

@faraday
I make board post so rarely looking up how to is not a burden. Any command I use often is not hard to memorize.
What I don't want is giving some random other player the ability to shit out images on to my screen. I much prefer them getting to put a link I am politely not click on. If the default is to see them and the onus to figure out how not to is on me that is not a situation I would care to sign up for.

[faraday]

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

What I don't want is giving some random other player the ability to shit out images on to my screen. I much prefer them getting to put a link I am politely not click on. If the default is to see them and the onus to figure out how not to is on me that is not a situation I would care to sign up for.

Then don't? I mean nobody's forcing you to.

But I'm pretty confident in asserting that the number of people turned off by having to use a command line with an obscure syntax is far, far, far greater than the number of people turned off by having to click a button in their account profile to disable images from automatically appearing.

[Seraphim73]

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

Moreover, people will not change from their current clients. I see people complain about how SimpleMU doesn't support https links and 256-color, but still refuse to change to Potato.

Hell, I'm still using zMUD. That's because I'm a stick-in-the-mud luddite grognard though. I'm sure that Blu will haul me over to Potato sooner or later. But yes, I'm part of the problem... I like what I like, and I want what I like to work with the new shininess -- even when it can't, because it hasn't been updated in a decade.

As @ThatGuyThere mentioned, I don't particularly want a bunch of images. I also don't really want to have to click on a button to page someone--it's much easier (for me) to keep my fingers on the keyboard. But a new player? Really shouldn't have to learn the 'page' command. It's archaic. It's arcane. It's a barrier to entry. If we want to gain new players, we grognards are going to have to be willing to change. If we don't want to gain new players? That's alright too, but MU*s will start to fade away, replaced by other forms of RP, because we're constantly losing players, and if we aren't gaining them to make up the numbers? Yeah... going away. That doesn't, of course, mean that you can't have a hell of a lot of fun on the way out.

[Lithium]

@seraphim73 I like zMud for actual MUD's. On some games it was practically necessary to customize triggers to be successful.

[Auspice]

As far as 'graphical tie-ins' go, I gave Pueblo a good run back in the day. Like, 'played on a Pueblo-enhanced anime MU*' so I could give it a full try.

I think there's a solid reason the 'full graphical clicky' tie-ins didn't gel with roleplayers. Or why those of us who do dip our toes into MUDs from time to time have a very different mindset for that gameplay vs our usual gameplay.

It's all very fundamentally different. It's not just a matter of 'throw out telnet and make a new interface.'

[Bobotron]

@surreality

Damn, I was testing it. Some clients use /<stuff> in other manners like BeipMU. I tested it fine in MUSHclient though...

I have to wonder if doing something unprecedented (for standard MU*s, anyway), like, instead of handing out the address to use standard clients, force people to connect through a web-based client (I can't recall ever seeing anyone try to do it this way)? PennMUSH offers Banana (assuming you can get it set up), there are others like ChroMUD as well. That way, whatever funky code you use for your game to make it accessible with IRC-mirror commands, and such like that, is always consistent to THAT GAME SPECIFICALLY?

It doesn't get all the things on @faraday 's list, but it gets at least a 'consistency' down so that you can start trying to work around some of the differences in commands via softcode command mirroring.

The other thing to consider, MU* works for what we do (those oldbides of us) because it's NOT tied to something like a GUI. Which then would require even MORE code knowledge to make something tie to buttons, make the buttons show what they do, etc. Right now you can go 'Oh, the syntax is snarfblatt'. But it'd be more difficult to create a GUI, unless the client is written to map the buttons in an easy way.

@Sparks

Re: github/coding live. Eh...? I can't recall the last time that games I played on, or games I was running, did 'coding live'. If a game has a dedicated coder, and that coder has a lick of sense, they're going to have a secondary port with a copy of the game to test their shit on without potentially borking shit.

[Seraphim73]

@lithium Yeah, that's what I started on, an RP MUD where combat was heavily into triggers. But I got used to the features (scrolling up and down through previous commands entered, easy logging, the ability to start entering a command, scroll up, enter something else, and come back to the in-progress command and finish it, mapping, etc) and just decided not to update, because I was used to zMUD, and because I had paid $20 for the license, damn it. Even if it was almost 20 years ago.

[Derp]

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

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

How is that substantially different from the \ and \\ we already use?

[faraday]

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

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

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

How is that substantially different from the \ and \\ we already use?

I never claimed it was a tremendous leap forward or anything. @surreality requested an /me alias for pose (for compatibility with chat programs) so I added one. /me and \ aren't the same command at all, so I don't understand your question.

[Derp]

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

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

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

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

How is that substantially different from the \ and \\ we already use?

I never claimed it was a tremendous leap forward or anything. @surreality requested an /me alias for pose (for compatibility with chat programs) so I added one. /me and \ aren't the same command at all, so I don't understand your question.

Fair, I suppose. But I see both of these things as 'beginner way to get text onto the screen in an easy manner that new people can easily understand', so I guess the technical intricacies between pose and emit, while probably entertaining for coders, is not quite as relevant for people just looking to get text on the screen.

Either way, there is a non-rocket-science way to do it that could easily be shown on the entry room desc. This just seems like... bloat. I thought we were trying to move away from that on the player side?

[faraday]

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

Either way, there is a non-rocket-science way to do it that could easily be shown on the entry room desc. This just seems like... bloat. I thought we were trying to move away from that on the player side?

Well the way I've done things with Ares is a built-in alias system that's transparent to the user. For example: what I tell new players, what the help files say, etc. will all tell you to read a bulletin board by typing bbs <#>. But bbread is aliased to it for those of us who have been using Myrddin's bbs for 30 years and would have a hard mental time switching to anything else at this point.

So in the same vein... /me will never appear in the help docs, but if someone used to it from other systems tries to use it, it'll just work seamlessly. Given that it's just one line in a configuration file, I don't really consider that 'bloat' personally.

[Derp]

So I assume that all aliases will be under the main help file? Or is this more invisible commands with no documentation? Not naysaying, just genuinely curious, since that is a problem that has been brought up before.

Also -- didn't we already have graphic, clickable stuff with Pueblo? I know the code is there, I have used it to make clicky exits in Mux. I have seen no one else do this, however. If this is so high priority, why weren't we doing it like ten years ago? Why aren't we doing it right now?

[Moonman]

Now, in spite of all my bitching about how Telnet is archaic, there are some things MU*'s do better than anything else I've seen:

• Rooms where you can navigate, either by cardinal directions (N, E, S, W) or by abstract idea (Main Street; your exits are: coffee shop, bank, alleyway)
• Objects and NPCs (typically called "mobiles" or "mobs") in those rooms
• Inventories of items with special properties that are on your character's person
• Complex code that can be applied to specific rooms, specific objects/inventory items, and specific NPCs

Things like Discord, while more elegant for the normies, do not come close to having this stuff. I think that if we are to keep MU*'s around and promulgate their credibility in these regards, we could maybe get enough new users to merit it. But the issue of hating command lines will persist, and I think that's worth addressing.