That isn't the kind of usage I'm talking about though. I'm talking more about the people who say things like "well, I'm an asshole, but at least I admit it" or "well, I'm an asshole, but at least I know I'm one". As if knowingly being an asshole mitigates.
I guess that's better than being a hypocrite about it? "I'm not an asshole, I just tell it like it is".
'Cuz it's frustrating?
Get a spell checker already dammit, you misspelled "really awesome", and there's a freakin' space between the words.
@WTFE Not many people are assholes all the time, but even more importantly, almost everyone is an asshole sometimes.
Personally when someone acknowledges it I look at it as an admission of fault; it's not an apology - maybe that'll never come - but maybe more of a request - hey, I know I can be a jerk but I've got upsides too... is that okay?
If I waited to hang out either here or iRL only with perfect human beings I'd be one lonely son of a bitch.
@Bobotron I love the Magicians! So you'd recommend Young Justice? I've been looking for something to binge watch.
Getting close to a three plate deadlift and a two plate squat. The numbers are still shitty but itfeelsgoodman.
@Bobotron For starters, and to be honest, I'm not extremely worried about making things closer to a MU* per se just for the sake of drawing people based on the familiarity alone; if that was all that kept me from not having a grid at all I'd have spared myself a few weeks' worth of work and just wouldn't have an interactive one in-game, and let people pick them the way you describe.
But the grid is useful in retrospect. Immersion in the world is a big one, but I want to bake territories into the game from the ground up since then that opens the door to all sorts of automated resource-management options later on, which many kinds of games (L&L, Vampire, etc) could use.
To answer your question though, there is a hexagonal grid on which you can see 'neighborhoods'. On the most basic level a neighborhood is just a room that contains other rooms, which makes the interface more convenient if you want many locations geographically close to each other. So a neighborhood might be "The Eaton Mall" which contains a bunch of stores and businesses, "Casterly Rock" which again has living rooms, bedrooms, meeting rooms, etc and so on. You can see how many people are in a neighborhood right away, or mouseover one to get an image and general description as well as how many people are per location in it.
I'm currently working on the GUI to edit the grid and add custom non-interactive elements to it such as displaying roads but, more importantly, editing each hex square's properties. So the grid map could show the area around Casterly Rock is House Lannister territory - by color - and how much resource each square can produce, what its upkeep is, etc.
Games could then simply use this feature to display territory and that's it. Werewolf pack X has the light blue squares... done. It's a convenience. But if they want to they could also use the resource management for political/strategic purposes; maybe that 12,15 square of land is a copper mine, and if House Tyrell convinces the King to hand it over to them, they now increase their weekly yield of resources.
There are other advantages of coding this but they're out of scope for this answer... I hope it helped, and obviously if you have suggestions please feel free. 
So, some input would be appreciated!
Originally I was planning for my world to be populated by 'floating' rooms. You could just go wherever through a series of categorized menus and the only 'map' connecting them would be a wiki page or flat static graphic in-game showing their relative positions.
I've been taking this thread's input though and some of the ideas here are interesting as coding projects. There's an actual clickable grid now for which I have several interface ideas I think will pay out nicely once they're done, even if I'm currently stuck in back-end GUI hell enhancing the world editor to add point-and-click territories and ways to 'draw' roads to visually connect neighborhoods in different ways.
Anyway, the problem is there's just one of me. Anything I pour time into pushes other stuff back - and I'm well aware until I have the backbone made it'll be hard to recruit help, both because it's easier to get people excited by showing them what's already done (which atm wouldn't look as anything more than lines of code and disjointed semi-ugly interfaces - I'm not an artistic person) and because adding people to a project isn't that simple. Coordination involves an overhead of time and effort, too.
So the actual question here for people who've gone through these phases before... is it better to have a roadmap made and stick to it ("make a rudimentary <X> even if it means data entry by hand for now" -> "make a +jobs system" -> ... etc) even if other cool ideas come up in the mean time?
In other words what's a good balance between getting the overall project finished in the somewhat foreseeable future and getting some fun toys more polished on the way there?
As it stands I keep having more "holy shit, what if..." ideas than time to code them all. And of course even though I try to keep the design flexible once fundamental enough changes are added, sometimes I have to go back and change things which were already working.
Thoughts?
I have mixed feelings about this Star Wars vs Star Trek argument.
I just started with Linode a few days ago and it's going great. $5/month is nothing (and the first few are paid by a coupon thing), I got root access on a distro of my choice, and the machine is fast and responsive. No complaints.
Give me an idea of scale, people. How many rooms would you say an average MU*'s grid is? Don't include OOC or 'inside' rooms (living rooms, bedrooms, etc) in that number, just stuff you can reach straight from a street, streets included.
@faraday Yeah, in my current design (a work in progress) you can just jump to any room your PC is eligible for, and add favorites for quick jump-to points.
However I do want the grid to have a more functional purpose as well, so what do you think about this: There's a "you are here" marker and of course all rooms have their normal fixed coordinates... but you can switch the context mask though to see them under different contexts; for instance one might be geographical view (you can see room A is in an urban area, room B is in a forest at a glance), another might be domain based (gang territories, Vampire turfs, pack areas, House duchies), etc. Furthermore rooms are color coded based on how welcome your PC is likely to be there - green for "welcome, friend!", yellow for alliances, red for usually opposed factions, etc.
I'm trying to think other cool things we could add to it. On a MU there's only so much you can do before the interface gets in the way, and the screen scrolls too damn much.
@Misadventure It's not about immitating WoW - that was an example. It's about immersion.
I personally don't like grids; as far as I'm concerned figuring out how to navigate from A to B is a meaningless task since my RP-finding process doesn't involve walking in front of a bar in case someone's hanging out there, it's going to that bar - and even more so, that's after using tools like +where, +watch, actually paging people, etc.
If I had it my way I'd go with my original plan, which is a categorized list of hangouts, temp rooms and private properties. But part of the point of this thread is seeing what other people want and think - it'd be kind of silly to come here and ask then ignore the answers because they don't fit my specific playing style.
Having said that I had some other thoughts.
The first one that occurred to me was actually using Google Maps, with custom (fictional) places on them. It seemed like a fun idea if you based a game in say, Vegas then placed your Elysium on its real actual map, giving players the chance to look at pictures of the street outside it, etc. But I wanted to retain some flexibility here, and since that obviously wouldn't work with non-fictional settings I decided against it.
Spending time writing grid code will delay me but then it occurred to me that's not wasted time. I'm looking at some interesting hexagonal libraries which could be mighty helpful if I reuse them for other things - such as combat. It'd be kind of useful for a GM to be able to set the battlefield, place his NPCs and physical obstacles on it then have the players seeing it in real time as the PrP unfolds, wouldn't it?
I'm optimistic about all this but we'll see how it goes.
@tragedyjones I'll try for a hybrid approach and see if players can warm up to it. So making a grid available for them to peruse through a point-and-click interface (or maybe also alt+cursor keys) but also selecting rooms specifically through tag-categorized selections.
What I'm thinking of is a comment by the original developers of WoW, who claimed they didn't want to add too many flight paths (and hated flying in general) since that shrinks the world and disconnects it from the players. I figure these guys know their stuff, too.
@Thenomain said in Project X:
How would you implement places on a web interface?
Something similar (but better) than folders in a list-view, with or without the expansion arrow. You create an embedded window that until you 'join' you can only see the people there. Once you join, you get a secondary discussion window, a "spawn" if you will.
That's a good take. I need to figure out how to do these things without sacrificing screen space for them - maybe a hideable panel.
Basically the way I'm doing it so far is container-based and (at least unless I figure out people are really into that) grid-less. You don't need to know how to get from A to B; if B is a viable destination for you - basically if your character/group is eligible to go there - you can pick it from a sortable list based on its tags, or just right-click on another PC and pick "join" then... there you are.
The way I'm doing it, a "room" is the most basic of places you can be in. It contain 'places' of course, but it can also contain other rooms; so for instance you can create - and there's a web interface for that, else I'd go mad - a "bar" which is just that, or you can create a "mansion" which can have a "reception area", a "dining room" and "stables".
This just gives some future flexibility for stuff like, say, creating powers that let you spy on what happens in other rooms in the same vicinity. Maybe. Anyway.
The challenge here is figuring out how to depict all this in an intuitive way, and not have a bunch of random shit take up precious space where poses should be flowing.
The other question is whether a grid is necessary (okay, 'wanted') at all. From a technical POV it's not so hard to link rooms together, and although I personally care little for grids, I do want this to be open enough to be used by others in the future.
So, as I'm wrapping up the first iteration of the 'grid' system, how would you innovate that concept without telnet's limitations?
For example I'm allowing for a picture (which might become a 'gallery' if there's a case for it) of the room so there's a consistent visual outside of the room description, and of course tagging rooms in a number of ways ("suburban area", "Red Eyes Gang territory", "entertainment" might all fit "Joe's Bar"), as well as starring it by characters to add it to a favorites list, but what else could be done?
How would you implement places on a web interface? One suggestion was to figure out a way to represent them in terms of the room layout but would that be both useful and clear? Representing these things on the UI might also be a disproportionate technical challenge compared to its effects in the game.
There'll be 'locks' per character/group and there's already a WYSIWYG editor of course for room descriptions and world tags. But I'm searching for ideas.
Anything else you'd do with the world building?
@ThatOneDude No, it's a server written from scratch in PHP using web sockets and ajax. It's not telnet over a web browser, telnet isn't being used anywhere. I'm nearly (?) done with the world editing tools, and once that's over I'll start working into making a +job system.
It's just a bit of a process since I need to implement from scratch at least the basics of what others have implemented for MUSHes for years. For example after that come 'boards', then channels, etc.
@Coin I catch myself wanting to be an elitist asshole a lot of the time. For example I'm on a FB D&D group where people ask questions like "should an $alignment druid do <X>?" and I find myself inclined to go into tirades about how characters aren't just cardboard copies of each other pigeonholed by alignment and... argh, that's not constructive. I mean it could be but not in the semi-dismissive way I'd be phrasing it after years of delving deeper into concepts and themes in MU*-dom.
Worse, this same principle applies to how casually (or not) we delve into our hobbies. The same conversation about WoW is completely different from the perspective of a hardcore raider who's on the cutting, bleeding edge to milk that extra 2% out of his efficiency, and the guy who doesn't remember the name of that instance with the worm boss who sucks you in after it's defeated. Open condescension often ensues, especially if the conversation is online (we're all such badasses when we're not face to face), and that's for fans of the exact same game.
@surreality said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
First, no can do, not my pattern. (Law is law is law is whew thank gods there's an out.)
Pardon the extreme ignorance, but there are (enforceable) copyrights on knitting patterns?
... And are y'all nerds going to stare at me like I'm completely stupid now? 