Best posts made by faraday

@Thenomain said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

@faraday said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:
Except I think that these challenges are the same challenges faced by using existing IP: How to teach people to play.

To an extent. But having created both original and existing IP games, my personal experience is that it's WAY easier to teach people to play when 80-90% of your player base comes through the door with a basic familiarity with the universe.

@puzzlebox Wiki Source -- Example. @GirlCalledBlu set that up for us.

@misadventure said in Books...Books...Books....:

Sword and sorcery with a light Christian element"

There's always Narnia, heh.

I'm not familiar with Song of Seare myself, but some of the series my kids in that age bracket like are:

Ranger's Apprentice - fantasy adventure, kinda junior LoTR

Keeper of the Lost Cities - telepath, elves, world parallel to ours sort of thing

Wings of Fire - dragons have their own game of thrones I guess

@apu said in TGG/The Greatest Generation People:

@faraday

I didn't meet Jim until... 2007 I think, and didn't play there until 2008? It coincided with the two of us RPing on Kharon, whenever that was.

Kharon was 2009. Pacifica ran until the end of 2007. Genesis spun off from there, and Kharon came after AFAIK.

TGG-wise, the Gallipoli campaign was 2009.

@skew I'm not really clear on what you're trying to do with strcat there. But in general, if you do:

[ u( x ) ] [ u( y ) ]

Then x will run and finish before y.

You can use a setq to save the results if you need to (but that gets into the need to localize and other goofiness):

[ setq( 0 , u( x ) ) ] [ strcat( %q0 , y ) ]

There is no equivalent to wait() in function programming.

@Ashen-Shugar Yeah the progression I usually point folks towards is Amberyl's manual, then my journeyman level guide and finally some tips for large-scale systems. But all of those docs are ancient and not the greatest.

@Sunny said in MU Flowchart:

It will not teach you mush code, but the Stanford class (it's free) should get the concepts across enough for you to teach yourself the mush stuff using helpfiles, dissecting other peoples' code, and asking for the occasional bit of help. Very few of the mush coders I know are anything but mostly self-taught.

I'm not even sure that learning a mainstream language will help much. I mean, yes, some of the extremely basic concepts (lists, functions) are the same, but the languages are so tremendously different. And MUSHcode is just plain hard if you want to do anything of any complexity.

Frankly I wouldn't steer anyone towards learning MUSHcode at this point. Learn Python (for Evennia) or Ruby (for AresMUSH, which I promise will be publicly available one of these days) and try your luck with one of the next-gen servers. I think you'll end up in a better place - and learn a language that might actually be useful in the real world.

@fatefan DO got rid of a lot of their pre-configured droplets and I believe MediaWiki was one of them.

@derp I just finished Artemis by the same guy and it was awesome.

@rnmissionrun said in Chronicles of Darkness cyberpunk game seeking help.:

The hard part is usually code, but the fact they'll be writing that code in Python rather than MUSHcode should speed up the process considerably.

On the one hand you've got "installing @Thenomain's ready-to-go WoD library and tweaking it on TinyMUX" and on the other hand you've got "learning a new framework + building an entire WoD chargen/skill system from scratch in Python + redoing lots of MUSH globals that don't exist in core Evennia". There are many reasons to use Evennia. But there's no way on earth it'll be faster - or even vaguely comparable in effort.

@the-sands said in Mocker - Complete TinyMUX setup with Docker:

I fully intend to document how I have created the Docker images and what is going on with them so that the project will outlive me, assuming there is interest, and people will be able to create their own quick deploy setups.

This is awesome. I want to do a docker image for Ares but I don't really know much about it. I definitely would be interested in how you set this thing up.

@Tat said in MU Flowchart:

This is a super awesome goal. I've often wanted to do bodily harm to whoever decided that code should be one blob of indecipherable text that would break if you have mismatching punctuation.

Even though I despise working with it these days and my programmer friends laugh incredulously when I show it to them - it's actually quite a marvel.

I mean... you have to keep in perspective the technical capabilities of when it was written, and also why it was written. It was a scripting language for building and end-user customizations like falcon controllers, multi-descers and vending machines - and for that level of stuff it works just dandy. It had to be done in one blob because the only way of inputting text to the game was a raw telnet connection. And people are still using it decades later!

So I don't knock the original developers - they've made something that has held up remarkably well. It was just never meant for the kinds of ginormous systems people started using it for. Times have changed and we need a better tool for the job.

Which is all, like... way the heck off topic but we were already off in the weeds with My Little Pony so I don't feel too bad.

@skew ctrl-p and ctrl-n are SimpleMU commands for scrolling through your command history (previous and next).

@lithium said in Star Wars?:

The big damned heroes are already cast, so what does that make the PC's?

Uh... heroes in different stories? I mean, I get what you're saying but I don't get how that's different from literally every other MU out there. Even if it was a wholly original setting, not every MU character can be the last remaining "chosen one" literally saving the entire galaxy multiple times. It just doesn't scale that way.

@ixokai Thanks for the feedback.

The FS3 plugins can be disabled easily, as explained in Enabling and Disabling Plugins.

As for creating your own system - any new codebase is going to be somewhat overwhelming, whether you're sitting down to learn MUSHCode for the first time or you're like me trying to figure out Evennia (even though I know a little Python).

Have you checked out the Coding for AresMUSH tutorials series? One of the tutorials is implementing a simple traits plugin like you might find on a comic game. I thought that would be a good place to start for someone wanting to make a more sophisticated RPG system. If you find that inadequate and have some suggestions on where the gaps are, I'd be glad to hear it.

@surreality said in Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online):

@Ganymede A prefs system is a good communication tool. It is not, and should never be considered to be, a communication replacement.

Sure, but tools aren't free. There's a cost to create the tool, a cost for people to read and understand and enter their preferences using the tool, and then a cost for people to actually use the tool to see other peoples' preferences. I remain unconvinced that the cost and the likelihood of people using it effectively makes it worth the effort.

I wouldn't use it, personally. But I'm perfectly capable of saying: "OK guys, you've been captured by Cylons. If you want to be tortured you can be, but you don't have to be. Oh you do want to be tortured? That's fine, but I'm not going to GM it for you. We can either FTB here or you guys can get a RP room and knock yourselves out." It's really not that hard.

If someone wants to go through the trouble of implementing it on their own game - more power to them. I'm not saying they shouldn't. I'm just arguing that it's not necessary.

Is it handy to have the ability for players to create their own custom code? Absolutely.

Is it so necessary that you can't live without it? I challenge 'no'. I also challenge that it isn't even important enough to warrant a special in-game interface for doing so.

Find out what people want to customize and let them customize it through the regular command interfaces. Skins, custom options, etc.

@lithium said in Star Wars?:

If it's a Star Wars game that is set in the same time period, but, /away/ from the big movie plot, with no FC's etc, then maybe you've got something there.

Gotcha. Yeah, being along for the ride during a re-tread of New Hope wouldn't interest me any. I was thinking more of things like SW:Rebels or Rogue One, where the PCs could be adjacent to the movie storyline but still had room to tell their stories and even potentially be heroes in their own right. (Though you still have the problem with the limited number of epic hero moments we discussed in the Spotlight thread.)

@rnmissionrun said in AresMUSH Updates:

I think I got as far as the "Coding for Ares" page, saw that it didn't really tell me anything, and stopped reading.

Hmm... was this awhile ago? Because yes, during the alpha stages the installation scripts had various issues and the tutorials were virtually non-existent. I wouldn't be surprised if someone got frustrated trying to figure it out - but it wasn't really ready for public consumption yet.

Since then, though, I've polished up the install scripts to be as hands-free as possible and spent considerable time trying to make the documentation as robust as I could as @tat and @krmbm mentioned (thanks!) It doesn't just cover Ruby but goes into the various components of the Ares code. It has two step-by-step tutorials (Quickstart and Creating a Plugin) that give an overview of how to use the basic building blocks. If you saw all that and still feel that it "doesn't really tell me anything" then please feel free to submit ideas for what sort of tutorials you would like to see.

As someone who has many projects and non-infinite free time, choosing projects wisely is important. Others will obviously have different priorities.

That said, I will never have such a veils/lines/prefs tool on my game because I feel it foists a level of responsibility onto storytellers that I am not comfortable accepting.

If you put "triggered by spiders" in your profile, and I somehow miss it and I put spiders in my scene, I don't want you coming at me all: "I had this in my prefs profile WTF is the matter with you, you monster - you caused me a RL panic attack."

I refuse to accept responsibility for someone else's mental health while playing a game. We're all adults. I will be considerate and accommodating to the best of my ability when someone raises a concern to me directly, but I'm not comfortable with the impartial and potentially unreliable nature of relying on a tool for such important communication.

Again, that's just me. If someone wants to use such a tool on their game and accept responsibility themselves - that's their business.

@Ghost said in WebMU still in use?:

This is a bit of a stretch as I don't know of any games that have paid for this as an option. SSH is an upgrade from telnet that allows for encryption.

I know it's not exactly the same thing, but most ares games operate over HTTPS so you have more security when playing via the web portal.

Even if games did support SSH, it wouldn't really change the underlying problem that most work/school IT depts will blanketly ban connections to weird ports like 4201. They rarely have a legitimate business use.

But the rest of the advice is spot on. Connecting with a MU is like connecting to a website that's just running HTTP where most browsers will warn you "INSECURE - HERE BE DRAGONS".

I get the desire for folks to connect during the day, but actively attempting to circumvent IT security is a good way to get fired. I wouldn't be surprised if it could also be considered some kind of cyber crime (though most likely they would "just" settle for firing you).