A new platform?

[surreality]

@lotherio It's just really hideous design. There are definitely ways to do something similar that doesn't look like... well, that. It seriously looks like someone just slapped a bunch of different banner ads from the late 90s/early 00s for ninja classes or something onto a page with a text window and just... oh gods, no. There would be classier ways of wrangling such a design that would be slightly less 'hot mess'.

Like, I get people being turned off by the text window if that's the first time they're seeing it, but it's almost the least of that GUI design's sins. (The big ASCII block in the middle of it is simply baffling, for instance.)

[Arkandel]

Until we can get rid of a user's need to learn arcane incantations to do very simple every day things we won't be getting many new players. It's just how it is.

We can bemoan it, we can deny it, but in my mind there is no way the vast majority of say, college students - who used to be the main demographic we drew new players into the hobby from - are going to go from fancy, easy to use UI into typing a bunch of weird commands into unfamiliar programs which in some cases haven't been updated in years to play something they're not sure about.

We either do all of it - 100% - over the web or it won't happen. And I know it will happen (a persistent world to roleplay in is just too interesting, even if it happens organically by a different platform's evolution and not from within the MUSHing community), but it'd be great if it borrowed ideas from almost thirty years of our hobby's evolution.

[Lithium]

@arkandel Uh. We get new players.

I know several who are brand new to MU*'s. I myself have brought new people into the game.

I am not saying we don't need something universal, because that would be very cool, just saying.

[Lotherio]

@surreality said in A new platform?:

The big ASCII block in the middle of it is simply baffling, for instance.

There are better screen shots, that ASCII block is an extended in game map I imagine, not the right time to use the in-game commands to check the immediate area map or whatever it represents. It is a hot mess, I'd be good seeing a better design, but its not me, I hit my wall of wanting to learn code. I'm here for hobby, role-playing, collaborative story telling. Just offering opinions and thoughts.

@Arkandel

We either do all of it - 100% - over the web or it won't happen

I'm all for over the web. But why not use weblets and widgets and other API for functions the college kids will be familiar with. Why not ditch bboards and mail for some forum software similar to nodebb. I'd much rather PM and add to threads in this format than navigate bboards. And I'm adapt at their use both player and staff side. People are still surprised with the ability to reply to bboard posts and that's been around. They don't question how to reply here or on other forum/social mediums.

Edit: Beacuse (for the last paragraph), if we are spending time making commands for mail and bboards better in-games, it seems to distract from making the text experience better in some way in general and it can easily be replaced in some iframe or whatever through using some other program all together. If we're going to hack, why not hack existing stuff to fit the interface in stead of working from ground up on complete overhaul? As noted, unlike MMO's or even Iron Realms, no one is being paid to do it and there are not big teams that can accomplish this more quickly. I'd dare to say, what if the limited number of coding folks with the capability to do so actually worked together collaboratively on something new?

[Arkandel]

@lithium said in A new platform?:

I know several who are brand new to MU*'s. I myself have brought new people into the game.

Emphasis mine.

@arkandel said in A new platform?:

Until we can get rid of a user's need to learn arcane incantations to do very simple every day things we won't be getting many new players.

Obviously we'll still get some people. But look around - does this look like it did in the nineties? It doesn't, because back then it was still the norm to use command line interfaces to use your computer so people were familiar with the practice.

And yet today we have more tools than we did back then to open and run games; it's easier to find hosting, more publicly available platforms to run like Theno's, Ares and so on, waaay more households have internet access than back then (remember when going home from school might have meant not being online at all?), etc.

But now, anecdotal evidence aside, as a whole can you argue we are gaining more players than we are losing? The community once had multiple games with hundreds of individual connections every night, and now other than a couple of Arx, maybe FC and a couple of TS MU* I can't even name any more that have broken 3-digit numbers.

I don't have any other way of explaining this. Does anyone else? We can sit here and make excuses or we can accept what - to me - is pretty obvious.

[Ganymede]

@lithium said in A new platform?:

Uh. We get new players.

I know several who are brand new to MU*'s. I myself have brought new people into the game.

I concur.

I am enjoying a lot of the discussion here between developers that clearly have a lot of ideas, experience, and skill. And I like the discussion about how the medium could be updated.

But we also need to do what Lithium is doing, and we need to make sure our gaming environment is as helpful and welcoming as possible. Not that games don't do this, but, let's face it, we've all been on games where people seem loathe to actually help people.

That's a topic for another day. But, as one of the old farts around here, I ain't afraid of no new platform, bitches, so you best get going on that shit.

[Lithium]

@lithium said in A new platform?:

I am not saying we don't need something universal, because that would be very cool, just saying.

@Arkandel Note I am not disagreeing with you.

[Arkandel]

@lotherio said in A new platform?:

I'm all for over the web. But why not use weblets and widgets and other API for functions the college kids will be familiar with. Why not ditch bboards and mail for some forum software similar to nodebb. I'd much rather PM and add to threads in this format than navigate bboards. And I'm adapt at their use both player and staff side. People are still surprised with the ability to reply to bboard posts and that's been around. They don't question how to reply here or on other forum/social mediums.

Whatever solution ends up replacing telnet-based MUSHes as we know them will probably be more of a hybrid approach, at least at first. Although my preference is for something that generally looks like a traditional MUSH client (an input line at the bottom, a main window for poses) with all of the additional UI elements added to it(a Hangouts-like chat list on a retractable sidebar on the right that you can hide, tabs for 'channels', etc) or on demand. Do I want to send you a mail? I right click on your name, pick that from a context menu and do so. Do I need to CC more people? I start typing their names in the TO: field, get autofill suggestions, etc.

If we're going to hack, why not hack existing stuff to fit the interface in stead of working from ground up on complete overhaul?

In a way that's what some people are doing, although I wouldn't call those hacks necessarily. Ares already has web interfaces for some of its functions, which is great.

If I can predict the future with my vast prophetic powers though, whatever will come 'next' will be produced by non-MUSH players. A forum or table-top simulator will evolve to the point (or offer enough tools to permit) a persistent playerbase, some way to interface playing in different rooms, a way to customize the underlying game mechanics... and boom.

Most current MUSHers will join their friends who play there, and existing telnet-based games will be deserted wastelands even by today's diminished standards.

[Apos]

@ganymede said in A new platform?:

But we also need to do what Lithium is doing, and we need to make sure our gaming environment is as helpful and welcoming as possible. Not that games don't do this, but, let's face it, we've all been on games where people seem loathe to actually help people.

That's a topic for another day. But, as one of the old farts around here, I ain't afraid of no new platform, bitches, so you best get going on that shit.

I don't think it's unrelated though. Like MUDs and MUSHes get grouped together interchangeably on a lot of sites but we know there's some really core philosophical differences in how they are presented for a lot of them, with a lot of MUDs being a MMO writ small while a MUSH being a tabletop writ large. This also means a different approach towards new players, where the former is going to be a lot more automated because a reactive environment is a core part of their game philosophy, while the latter is about getting players into RP situations with other players.

For mushes, I think even aside from all the technological hurdles, we're waaaaaay more reliant on it being a welcoming environment than most other game formats. Not just in removing toxic hostility, but if someone logs into a confusing new game, tries to RP, and has no luck, it's a hard sell for them to just keep at it. I think people will forgive an unbelievably confusing and archaic format if they find RP and have fun, but that won't happen without active engagement and mentorship for most people.

Another tricky aspect is that imo one of the biggest strengths of MUSHes and what makes them a compelling RP format is inherently limiting in size. One of our strong selling points for some MUs is that we are providing hands on, personalized stories that overlap with other people. And GMs can only GM for so many people, so growing past a certain point is extremely challenging with most games just want a sweet spot of players and no more or no less.

[Ganymede]

@apos said in A new platform?:

I don't think it's unrelated though. Like MUDs and MUSHes get grouped together interchangeably on a lot of sites but we know there's some really core philosophical differences in how they are presented for a lot of them, with a lot of MUDs being a MMO writ small while a MUSH being a tabletop writ large. This also means a different approach towards new players, where the former is going to be a lot more automated because a reactive environment is a core part of their game philosophy, while the latter is about getting players into RP situations with other players.

I disagree.

My experience on MUDs has largely been negative. I had difficulty acclimating to the commands and the system. I read over the manuals and help files, but it wasn't clicking. And when I asked about it, I was told brusquely that everything is crystal clear.

Like technical manuals.

While MUSHes are more reliant on having a welcoming atmosphere, having a welcoming atmosphere, in my opinion, is the sine qua non of whether any MUD or MUSH survives. You could have staff and people creating plots and battles to play through, but if they are all dickbags the place is going to fall apart.

[faraday]

@lotherio said in A new platform?:

But it seems we're focused on re-inventing the wheel when web interface already has gadgets/wickets/platforms/extra/etc that could be made to work in a web frame along side a window client for the RP side that is the typical RP oriented things for the mush to work. There are tons of apps/gadgets/gizmos out there that could take a web frame and make it just as clunky as MUDlet, with options of control.

I looked into that very extensively when designing Ares and you're missing a few very critical points here:

1. It's a giant PITA to install and get all the moving parts working together. I mean, have you looked at the "Zero to MUX" thread lately? Just getting TinyMUX and MediaWiki installed is hideous. Throw in a forum and a ticket system and a Discord chat server and a Google calendar and whatnot on top of that? And then when some update happens and one piece stops playing nice with your system? Good luck.

2. People don't want to go to six different places to get the information for the game. They don't want to have to create six different logins. (And you might think single sign on would work but no - not gonna happen.)

3. We don't really need all that complexity. MUSH mail and bb posts are pretty simple. We don't need a whole email system or forum software.

So yes, we're reinventing the wheel to an extent - but only a small, simple wagon wheel and for good reasons.

Is it saving any work, becoming easier? Or is it just adding more options that equate to more work?

It really depends on what you want. Using Ares with FS3 can be installed and configured without touching a single line of Ruby code. Installing community plugins (which will include several other skill systems) may take a few code tweaks, but the instructions tell you exactly which lines of code to change to plug them in. So if that meets your needs, then yes - it absolutely saves work even though there's a GUI involved.

But for new code? Of course it's going to be more work to do ASCII+GUI as opposed to just ASCII or just GUI. But we're kinda stuck with that as long as we're forced to design hybrid systems that support both interfaces.

@arkandel said in A new platform?:

lthough my preference is for something that generally looks like a traditional MUSH client (an input line at the bottom, a main window for poses) with all of the additional UI elements added to it(a Hangouts-like chat list on a retractable sidebar on the right that you can hide, tabs for 'channels', etc) or on demand. Do I want to send you a mail? I right click on your name, pick that from a context menu and do so.

Yeah that all sounds great, but here we run into some practical issues. We want to have a game server that:

• Is easy to install with very little technical experience.
• Is easily extensible for whatever custom systems a game wants to add on.
• Supports a hybrid interface with multiple inputs.
• Has a really kick-butt user interface with all kinds of fancy UI elements.

Many of those goals are mutually-exclusive. The fancier you make something, the more complex it gets. The more moving parts you add, the harder it is to install. And so forth.

I think we have to be a bit realistic with our expectations.

[surreality]

@faraday said in A new platform?:

@arkandel said in A new platform?:

lthough my preference is for something that generally looks like a traditional MUSH client (an input line at the bottom, a main window for poses) with all of the additional UI elements added to it(a Hangouts-like chat list on a retractable sidebar on the right that you can hide, tabs for 'channels', etc) or on demand. Do I want to send you a mail? I right click on your name, pick that from a context menu and do so.

Yeah that all sounds great, but here we run into some practical issues. We want to have a game server that:

• Is easy to install with very little technical experience.
• Is easily extensible for whatever custom systems a game wants to add on.
• Supports a hybrid interface with multiple inputs.
• Has a really kick-butt user interface with all kinds of fancy UI elements.

Many of those goals are mutually-exclusive. The fancier you make something, the more complex it gets. The more moving parts you add, the harder it is to install. And so forth.

I think we have to be a bit realistic with our expectations.

(If only I could upvote something more than once.)

@Ashen-Shugar had a very important point earlier about this also: the kinds of things people are talking about needing and that are somehow and for some reason required so we don't all die oh no are equivalent to things that entire full time paid teams develop over a period of years.

That is not even a little bit realistic. If someone wants to try to take that on, more power to them, but stop stating it as a requirement for anyone to ever be interested in the hobby. It's not.

Again, of course all the people who used to be around all the time when they were in college don't have that kind of time now. Full time jobs and mortgages take precedence to pretendy fun time games for most adults. Maybe it will all go up in smoke when we collectively die. Maybe it'll all see a resurgence when the older farts retire and miss ye olden golden days of pretendy fun time land. Who knows?

Just please stop stating this as a requirement for survival because new college students don't think it's shiny enough or think something else is more fun for them these days. Whatever that thing is will go the same way this has in time. Those people may like some of the same things we do but wouldn't enjoy others, and as a result, the differing community expectations would not suit them at all no matter how many bells and whistles and WYSIWYG buttons and forms and contextual menus are available.

[Ganymede]

@surreality said in A new platform?:

Just please stop stating this as a requirement for survival because new college students don't think it's shiny enough or think something else is more fun for them these days.

I must have missed where Faraday said anything remotely close to this.

[surreality]

@ganymede Faraday isn't at all -- I'm just agreeing with that chunk of her post 1000%.

A few other folks are discussing the necessity of this, however.

[Altair]

@surreality said in A new platform?:

the kinds of things people are talking about needing and that are somehow and for some reason required so we don't all die oh no are equivalent to things that entire full time paid teams develop over a period of years.
That is not even a little bit realistic.

I agree, and I even caught myself thinking in this way just this morning while trying to leave @faraday some AresMUSH feedback. Thinking about it more thoroughly, though, one realizes: there are a lot of things that we have gotten used to having in MUing only as a result of playing on games which were stood up by people who are actually server admins in their day jobs.

The first example I can think of is the currently-typical setup of a MU server running alongside a MediaWiki installation. A lot of the more advanced functionalities I find myself personally taking for granted, or wanting to have access to, were actually only possible because someone involved in the game setup process was able to install and configure MediaWiki, which is a fully-featured tool developed by actual developers out there somewhere. Same deal with a lot of the code packages we use for MUs, which come to us from the work of professional coders who just happened to have this as a hobby.

The process of making MUSHing more accessible to the layperson likely means compromising on some of those more advanced features, in order to realistically develop something that is as broadly usable as possible. We can't simultaneously make a platform that is basic and approachable, yet also has all the bells and whistles. Not because it's not possible, but because the amount of work necessary for one or two people to create and configure all that is a barrier against the actual end goal: a system that lowers the bar to entry, that is easy to produce, that is also easy for an end user to deploy.

[Lotherio]

@surreality said in A new platform?:

@ganymede Faraday isn't at all -- I'm just agreeing with that chunk of her post 1000%.

A few other folks are discussing the necessity of this, however.

I'm not saying those are necessities on my end, but those seem to be some of the goals others are after.

I think my boat is, its an upgrade, but the amount of work to set something up isn't changing. The change is the old grumpy folks like me can stick to PennMUSH (or preferred old code/system) until its dead, and the new places will be new players. Some middle ground folks will make the transition most likely.

Just for new platforms, I want some versatility. There is no demand by me for these things to happen, and I'm noting there are options out there to frankenstein something together. My focus is and always will be text window and my ability to emit. Not the /me jumps in water with the screen showing globally/locally: Lotherio jumps in the water. But my ability to simply write something and have it show to others, in a live persistent, shared environment format.

My initial quandary into this conversation is more, are we pushing more people out of these new updates who have been in the hobby compared to new folks coming in, I think that was missed cause I'm bad at getting to the point. I know most don't care who leaves, most of my early friends from the 90s have left do to regular dramas and other negative aspects of the hobby, but good for them as a few (like others we all know) have gone into the being an author thing with publications to show for their efforts.

[Thenomain]

@faraday

But you had to make sure that this was part of your development. Compare this to, e.g., adding a command to Mux.

Just because nobody else has to do it once it’s done doesn’t mean it’s not development, nor a spike. It just means that it only needs to be done once, which is just good design.

But if I add a command to the game, I should also develop the web interface for it.

Development time increases.

If I want it to look good and not ass (which is where I started, if you follow my comments back), it’s going to need more design work.

Development spike.

This is all I was talking about. This is all. No hidden agenda. No trickery. Just evidence that doing this shit gets harder, not easier, if we want to compete with Web 2.0/3.0 design style.

Even after mentioning this twice.

That.

Was.

All.

—

Edit: What @Lotherio and @Ashen-Shugar said more calmly.

[Arkandel]

@faraday said in A new platform?:

Yeah that all sounds great, but here we run into some practical issues. We want to have a game server that:

• Is easy to install with very little technical experience.
• Is easily extensible for whatever custom systems a game wants to add on.
• Supports a hybrid interface with multiple inputs.
• Has a really kick-butt user interface with all kinds of fancy UI elements.

Many of those goals are mutually-exclusive. The fancier you make something, the more complex it gets. The more moving parts you add, the harder it is to install. And so forth.

I think we have to be a bit realistic with our expectations.

I really don't think those goals are spacetech technology. MSB is using node.js and websockets right now, and it's not even running over nginx which it was meant for; sure, it took some tweaking but it was perfectly doable. I don't think anything I mentioned is that uncommon - features like a live chat and content tabs are well documented and robust by now, and yet no MU is using them*.

Sure, the end goal would be to have a fully extensible easy-to-set-up platform but that won't happen on day 1. Hell it won't happen on day 366, either; as you noted, even for the game platforms we have been using for years there are complications for non-technical people to install.

But at least we do have them. Sure, it might a bitch to extend and it'd take an effort by someone like @Chime or @Thenomain to do so and make it available to others, but there was something for them to build on for the next 'generation'. We currently don't really have anything that works even on a monolithic level, and covers any of those requirements.

Even if someone built a game and then released it to the public as-is, no promises made, very little documentation, at least it'd be something to build on. That's what we're missing.

[faraday]

@arkandel said in A new platform?:

I don't think anything I mentioned is that uncommon - features like a live chat and content tabs are well documented and robust by now, and yet no MU is using them*.

They're not uncommon, but they're also not well-documented and robust. Almost nothing in web development can be considered well-documented and robust actually. It's all a hodgepodge of swiftly-changing technologies. But those kinds of features are not trivial by any stretch.

[surreality]

@arkandel The hurdles you're describing aren't small, though.

Bluntly, I could probably figure out a way to do most things off a wiki if it had a good extension for chat. (Some exist, but they're not practical or appropriate for our needs.)

I could arguably learn enough to write one -- or determine if it is even possible to have one that suits our needs -- but the odds of that are absurdly slim; I don't have programmer brain, I predominantly have artist/designer brain with a smidge of technical-shit-I-had-to-learn on the side, like garnish.

This would require far more SQL-fu than I have, and a lot more programming in a variety of other languages to make the necessary 'play on the website' extension.

None of which I know.

Then there are the privacy tweaks it'd require so people who don't feel like having their kinky sexytimes scenes readable by everyone and their brother. I don't personally care if they are visible for those comfortable having them visible, but I wouldn't want my writing in those moments to be visible, and know I'm not the only one who feels this way. This is not insignificant, unfortunately. There will always be kinky sexytimes scenes people want to play, and there will always be people who aren't cool with the whole world reading them; there's no policy way around that one.

I could try to convince someone one or more of the above efforts is worthwhile and try to work with them, but, frankly, the bits of help I have managed to get are already huge, and I can't imagine asking someone to work on something like that if they aren't as into the idea as I am. (Absolutely no one is.) If I could pay someone buckets of cash to do it, sure, I could probably find someone who could manage it -- but that's not happening without a lucky Powerball ticket.