Best posts made by faraday

@the-sands We're not talking exclusively about WoD here and many systems do make express claims about what certain skill levels represent. Argue about it all you want, it doesn't change what some rulebooks actually say.

I, too, am sorry for coming across as "try harder", which was certainly not the intent. As @Wyrdathru said - programming is hard, and everyone learns differently. Dissecting code is a common way to go, but it is by no means the only one.

I can't really help with Evennia, but for anyone interested in learning Ares code there's a whole suite of tutorials and I'm happy to answer questions and help out those who want to learn.

@Ashen-Shugar said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

However, on the condition of a full moon, between the times of midnight and 3am, I want players with a race of 'WOLF' to do an entirely different feature set by typing 'bob' at the same time that everyone else can still use the normal 'bob', which, of course, returns to the normal 'bob' after the conditions have elapsed.

Figured this would be a good chance to contrast Evennia and Ares' philosophy for command handling.

Ares has the Engine (which provides core services) and Plugins (which handle commands, events, and data storage).

One of the core services provided by the Engine is command dispatching. When a player types a command, the Engine goes through each of the Plugins asking "do you want to handle this?" until it finds one that does. It then executes a Command Handler provided by the Plugin. If nobody wants the command, you get the usual "Huh?" message.

Most Plugins implement a very straightforward if/else or case statement based on the command root and switch. For example:

Who Plugin:

      case cmd.root
      when "where"
        return WhereCmd
      when "who"
        return WhoCmd  
      else
        return nil   # I don't want it, move on to the next plugin
      end

Mail Plugin:

      case cmd.root
      when "mail"
        case cmd.switch
        when "send"
          return MailSendCompositionCmd
        when "start"
          return MailStartCmd
        ... etc ...
      else
        return nil   # I don't want it, move on to the next plugin

But Plugins could also do more sophisticated dispatching. You could have a command that only got handled if the enactor is a Wolf character in the Special Room on a Tuesday.

You can also do that sort of check inside the Command Handler itself. For example, you could have the BobCmd do something like:

BobCmd handler:

def handle
    if (you're a Wolf in the Special room on a Tuesday)
       do something
   else
      do something else
    end
end

It's not as elegant as Evennia's command sets, and it doesn't follow the old MU* strategy of letting you tie those command sets directly to rooms or characters, but I like to think it's pretty straightforward and easy to understand/extend. I hope?

Two other things worth noting:

• Ares by default ignores the prefix (+, @, &, /) in front of commands. So who is the same as +who is the same as @who.
• ALL commands are handled by the plugins, even ones that were old-school 'hardcoded' commands like movement, pages, poses, help, etc. This allows you to override/replace/extend any game command without having to do who vs +who or help vs +help.

@the-sands said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

But the example given is WoD. Faraday quite literally was presenting the position that the other players should be expected to buy Drive in WoD so they wouldn't have an advantage over the newbie, despite the fact that the WoD rules say that they don't need it.

No, it really really really isn't. I mentioned Drive way back on one of the first pages of the thread and it was not system specific. (Actually it was in a post with mostly FS3 examples.)

Yes, I made an example at one point piggy-backing off off @ThatGuyThere's comment about 2 dots being needed for driving a Manual Transmission. If that's not in the latest edition of WOD - fine. I don't care. I don't play WOD. It doesn't change the fact that different people have different interpretations of what Drive 0 represents in different games. If a rulebook states it clearly - then great, there's no problem for that game. If a rulebook states it wrong, or doesn't state it at all, then that is the issue we're talking about.

Seriously. Re-read. This discussion is not in any way shape or form system specific.

@thenomain Nobody said it was easy. Nobody (at least not here) said not to take WHO apart and rebuild it from the pieces. (I've been saying that for years.) I really don't know how "F--- 'em" is meant to be constructive toward well-meaning people trying to help strangers learn to code in their spare time, but... yay for making awesome things, I guess?

@Griatch said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

How do you handle single-letter shortcuts, like ":" for emoting?

So yeah, in the vein of "everything is consistent until it isn't", there are a couple special cases for channels, room exits and poses. There's an emote catcher at the bottom of the Pose Plugin's get_cmd_handler method to look if the command starts with : or ; or whatnot. But command roots can be single letters, and there's also a shortcut system for aliasing (for instance) 'con' to 'connect'.

@ganymede said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

It sounds more complex that it is, but, really, the Silhouette system is light and very versatile.

I agree with what you've said about Sihlouette and Storyteller being pretty simple systems to grok. What I'm saying though is different. It's not about the mechanics.

Cate is a 3rd year Emergency Room resident physician who's pretty talented but not top of her class or anything. She's a little smarter than average - she got through medical school ok, but she's no genius.

What ratings are appropriate for that character's Medicine and Intelligence?

I can't answer that question by looking at dice and statistics. Is it 2 dots in Medicine? or 3? or 4? I'm not really sure. It kinda depends on whether you view 1 as "First Aid" or "Medical Student". What about intelligence - is what I described a 3? 4? I'm honestly not sure. (I'm trying to use WOD examples there for common ground but you could ask the same question with FS3 or any other system.)

If I pick wrong compared to what staff expects - my character is going to get bounced back to me, delaying my entry to the game. If I pick wrong compared to what other characters have chosen, I may be severely disadvantaged in plot scenes. And either way, I feel like I'm on shaky, uncertain ground, not confident in my chargen choices.

Skill census helps a bit, but it's not a magic bullet because you lack the context of those chars' backgrounds.

I'm not saying everyone needs to care about this issue. I'm just saying that some people care about this issue very much when they make up their characters. If your game doesn't have descriptions for what the levels actually are intended to mean - or worse, it has descriptions but they're wrong and/or everyone ignores them - then there's some percentage of players who are going to be drastically frustrated and/or led astray.

@griatch said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

Our documentation aims towards that goal. But the fact remains that it is hard to know, not only what people from vastly different backgrounds find difficult...

I just wanted to echo what @Thenomain has been saying. The biggest issue I've had with writing the Ares documentation is that a lot of the folks coming into it lack a foundational experience that most programmers take for granted.

(This is not a knock against them at all. They're very bright people, but either they haven't done coding/server administration at all, or have only done MUSHcode.)

So with a programming audience you can just say "connect to the server shell and run this command" but to someone who's only ever connected to a game from a MUSHclient, they need more guidance in terms of what a server shell is and how to connect to it with SSH/PuTTY/Powershell/etc. Otherwise the documentation is, as Theno said, like speaking Latin.

@Lithium I believe that anyone smart enough to figure out MUSHcode through experimentation and arcane help files is more than smart enough to learn Python or Ruby in short order with the right documentation and tutorials.

Ares is still in development so those docs/tutorials don't yet exist. But they will. I haven't looked much at Evennia's docs to know what state they're in.

Of course, whether or not it's worth the effort to you is a completely separate issue. For someone who can already do 99% of what they want to do in MUSHcode and doesn't see many advantages with a different framework... it probably isn't. That's totally cool. But to dismiss as impossible is doing yourself a disservice, IMHO.

@arkandel said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

I mean, it's part of why we got into these genres in the first place isn't it? Getting to play the stuff out that we're reading and watching?

Nope. I didn't get into these genres to play (or watch other people play) the sort of over-the-top fantasy tales that permeate some fiction. I prefer the other fiction where the situations may be exaggerated (lordy, the crew of Chicago Fire this season has probably faced more interesting calls than all fire departments across America put together) but the people are realistic.

I also am pissed off by most tabletop RPGs or MMOs where you're forced to start at a level 1 clueless newbie. I want to play the expert from the start. So FS3 is designed to let you do that without being penalized.

And I hate the "dino effect" on games where someone who's been playing for a couple years leaves a new player in their dust. I prefer horizontal advancement over vertical advancement.

But hey - that's just my jam. That's how I run my games. FS3 is configurable for a reason, but it's optimized for what I like. People forget - I didn't try to design a GURPs-like system that could work for anyone. I designed a system for myself and then was nice enough to share it.

@tat said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

Github was a ridiculous hurdle for me.
I didn't discover the debug/dev mode in Ares until way too late in the gam

These are good examples of the sorts of things that often are not obvious gaps to people writing tutorials (like me! Which is why I appreciate folks like Tat and @Thenomain - even though he decided he liked Evennia better - helping me build better ones).

Source control is like breathing to anyone who's done software outside of MUSHing. Sure you may not know GitHub specifically, but you know enough of the concepts to figure it out pretty easily. Running a local development environment and installing the tools you need. Doing things on the server shell. These are BIG hurdles to people who only know MUSHcode.

@Thenomain said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

Step 1: Recognize a built-in function from a defined function.

• In Mushlikes: Is it a u()? No: Is it in 'help'? No: @function/list.
• In Mainstream Languages: ...?

Agree with you in general principle. (Gasp!)

To answer your specific question for Ares/Ruby, the object-oriented bit helps a great deal. When you see FS3Skills.ability_rating(char, "Athletics") or "abc".ljust(22) it is hopefully reasonably obvious that ability_rating is a FS3 function and ljust is a Ruby string function. I do "google ruby whatever" a lot

And of course, using a mainstream language opens up a host of editors from Sublime Text to TextMate to VSCode to RubyMine that will provide you with anything from full-on intellisense support to an easy global search for "now where the heck is emit defined? Search for def emit"

Docs are critical, but tools and conventions help too.

@d-bone You like the hero's journey in Star Wars where Luke goes from zero-to-jedi in 5 minutes. I like Die Hard where John McClane is pretty much the same guy in movie 1 as he is in movie ... 4? 5? I kinda lost track. I'm not attacking you for your preferences. Should I be attacked for mine just because I shared my game system?

@griatch

Where shows where everyone is. Appearance varies but here's an example:

Usage: +where

+==~~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~=====~~~~=====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~~==+
                                MY MUSH                                 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Offstage - Offstage                 Faraday, Griatch
Offstage - Welcome Room             Guest-1
------------------------------------------------------------------------
3 Online                         0 IC                         2 Record 
+==~~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~=====~~~~=====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~~==+

Who is basically the same but with character info instead of locations:

Usage: +who

+==~~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~=====~~~~=====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~~==+
                               MY MUSH                                
      Name            Faction      Rank/Position                  Idle
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NEW   Guest-1                                                     1m   
STF   GameWiz         Army         Private - Teacher              1s  
------------------------------------------------------------------------
2 Online                         0 IC                         2 Record
+==~~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~=====~~~~=====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~~==+

finger is basically a character profile. Exact fields vary wildly but the general idea is something like:

Usage: +finger <character name>

+==~~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~=====~~~~=====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~~==+
                                   Stirling                                   
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Name    Nyssa Stirling           
Callsign     Whisper                  Eyes         Blue                     
Gender       Female                   Hair         Red                      
Faction      Navy                     Department   Air Wing                 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

@Jennkryst Since I felt guilty for taking the thread on an Earthdawn tangent, here you go: FFG Roller

But to illustrate my point - doing the die rollers in both Earthdawn and FFG took about half an hour each. Doing chargen or an advanced system like combat/space/econ? Many many hours. (So, no, not something I do for a random fun challenge, sorry @Ganymede :))

Dice are pretty easy to model on a MU because there's (usually) a pretty clear algorithm. Roll (something) (some number of times) and (add/subtract/whatever the results). Tabletop chargen/combat/etc. on the other hand aren't very MU-friendly because they have all kinds of special cases: "If you're an elf, you also get..." or "Pick three of these but not that..." or "And if it's raining and you're standing on your head then it's a -2 modifier..." and so forth.

It can be done (witness @Thenomain's WOD code or the various Star Wars/Shadowrun games that have come and gone), but it's a big undertaking and usually requires some compromises on the rules to make them work on an online game. I mean, ultimately that's why I created FS3. I wanted something that was designed from the ground up to work well on a MU and be easy to code. (Side note: Since the mechanics are designed for a computer, it would be just as awkward to do FS3 combat on tabletop as it would to do Shadowrun combat on a MU.)

@d-bone Groovy. As long as you don't want him to go from 'never picked up a pen' to 'God's gift to journalism' overnight you can absolutely do that sort of story in on of my FS3 games. You can go from 0 to "Good" in 6 months of determined XP spends, which I find more than reasonable for the "I never picked up a gun but now it's the zombie apocalypse and I'm forced to survive" type situations. The jumps are only big at the higher levels.

(And yeah, I probably should've stopped with movie 3 for the Die Hard example because after that the movies got utterly insane. No analogy is perfect.)

But this is all probably way off-topic so I feel bad now for helping to take the thread off on a tangent.

Yeah, MOO doesn't really use a mainstream programming language, though it is far closer to one than MUSHCode.

@Sparks Automated encounters isn't really my jam personally (too MUD-like for me) but it sounds like an impressive system. Kudos.

How do you (or do you?) prevent groups from just being completely stymied if they didn't bring along the right magic mix of PCs to address the challenges in a particular shard? "Oh well - none of us have the right skills to get through the magic door. Guess we're done." I would think you'd want it to be challenging but not flat-out impossible. Are the challenges geared towards the group?

@il-volpe said in Are there any active sci-fi MU*s these days?:

The BSG Universe is somewhat realistic; it's just set in the future.

I found it weirdly distracting to see that I have an identical radio and dog-bowl to the ones used by these space people from other planets.

It's not even our future, it's a parallel version, which makes it even more nonsensical.

But then, the Star Wars movies use WWII props, so... eh... it's Hollywood.

@d-bone said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

2 IG years seems pretty adequate amount of time to acquire a level of mastery that should be feasible ... A game with a multiplicative system really makes such advancement infeasible.

Does it? In FS3 3rd ed (using the stock configuration) you can go from "Fair" to "Extraordinary" in 2 years. That seems pretty comparable to what you're suggesting, even with an exponential advancement curve.

@misadventure said in Seeking Accessibility Feedback:

I feel like it should be possible to find the shift needed to cover color blindness in one or more forms, but that may be easy to handle on the client end.

Well the issue there is that there are several kinds of color-blindness. This site is good for understanding the impact of the different kinds.

So unless you actually have the player input which kind they are and custom-design colors for them, you can't really make a shift that works well for everyone.

As @Ninjakitten says, it's better to use color as an auxiliary signal rather than the primary source of information. In Ares, for instance, all success messages are green and errors red, but the underlying text in either case clearly states what's going on. The colors are nice but not essential.