Tangent - I didn't pick Ruby for Ares because I had some kind of love for the language. I barely knew it at the time.
The first Ares prototype was in C++, then I dabbled in C# with a Lua scripting thing for the plugins, then I tried Python seriously for a bit. Ruby was the one where the language itself supported the idea of a live-reload and easy overrides/extensions of core code via the plugins.
So I don't think there's anything magical about Ruby, but it's a nice language.
@krmbm said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):
I'd volunteer, but I can't actually get to Ares sites from work. Ports are blocked.
I can reach M*s through the Cheesesoftware, but not the actual portal.
Not sure which site you're referring to, but the site admin can potentially fix this by running the web portal on a droplet/linode on port 80. (Or by setting up a sub-domain on an existing website.) Then it looks like just a regular old website. Firewall blockers tend to mostly have an issue when you run it on a weird port. T8S for instance is running on port 8000, which many firewalls will be like : "Yeah, nope."
But yeah, Ares supports a lot of Wikidot syntax for my own sanity.
@lithium said in A New Star Wars game? (Legends of The Old Republic (Name pending)):
What unfamiliarity issues? It's Star Wars.
It doesn't change /that/ much. You have the Republic. You have Big Bads. You have privateers, pirates, mercenaries, cutthroats, merchants...
I don't want OP to take this as a criticism, since they should make whatever game they want to make. But since you asked...
I'm a casual Star Wars fan, which is to say I've watched the movies and played a few of the video games. I know jack about whatever time period y'all are talking about here. Jedi Civil War? Mandalorian war? Revan? No bloody clue, and I'd frankly be uncomfortable trying to jump into such a setting.
@krmbm said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):
I can reach the website, but it doesn't have any info. This is from BGSU right now (and my Ares install looks the same, running on the default ports).
We chatted offline, but for record of anyone else having a similar problem - that seems to be a pretty hardcore firewall. Each one is different and it's hard to troubleshoot without being able to go to the person on the other end all: "So hey why is this not working" 
There are some tricks you can do with ports and subdomains to make it more firewall-friendly which I'd be happy to discuss with folks outside the thread.
@lithium said in A New Star Wars game? (Legends of The Old Republic (Name pending)):
@faraday That is why you avoid all that stuff, you take away the expectation of previous knowledge beyond: Star Wars!
But that's kinda my point... "Star Wars!" to me is Empire vs Rebels or (to a lesser extent) Clone Wars. Anything else may as well be an original theme for all it resonates with me.
Ares has a script to do it. See Reset the Master Admin Password.
@lithium said in A New Star Wars game? (Legends of The Old Republic (Name pending)):
But clearly people would prefer to rehash the same old stuff.
To be clear - I'm not suggesting anyone rehash anything. Personally I see plenty of opportunity for stories in the Rebel/Empire era that have nothing to do with blowing up Death Stars or people in the Skywalker family. But that's not the point here. You asked why familiarity matters and I answered. "Star Wars!" means different things to different people, that's all. And to play in a game effectively, I need more to go on than "there's a Republic and Jedi and some guys with armor like Boba Fett." Constructively to OP: Don't assume that just because you have name recognition that people will understand the setting, unless of course you only wish to attract die-hard fans.
@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
what's a good way to bring potential new players to the hobby itself?
I don't think you can make meaningful progress on that front without addressing the systemic, technical and cultural issues that would be (rightly) out of scope for this thread. People finding games is seriously the least of our problems.
@thenomain said in A New Star Wars game? (Legends of The Old Republic (Name pending)):
@bored said in A New Star Wars game? (Legends of The Old Republic (Name pending)):
I just don't think it would ever work on a MU. Every timeskip would see ~half your playerbase quit in outrage/fail to engage in the new story/etc.
I've also dreamed of a game like this, but not the time nor inclination to follow through. The Reach/Fallcoast/Fallcoast2 is proving that it's possible, but the mere risk of losing players frightens a lot of people, staff and players alike.
But if the players are enjoying themselves, they will find a way to make it work. I played on a game long, long ago where the goal was reach the apocalypse. And the staff followed through. And half of us stayed on to play the after-effects and it was fun.
Yeah, I've done a "one year later" timeskip on two different games when big changes to the setting were part of the metaplot. Some folks hated it, but you could say that about virtually any MU decision. It's not like half the game ragequit or anything.
I personally wouldn't want to do a complete character wipe reset like @Auspice was describing, but even that is not necessarily a dealbreaker to everyone. Some folks like starting fresh. Witness TGG's ever-shifting campaign settings.
@sockmonkey said in What is your turning point?:
how you can move specific plots along without scheduling some scenes in advance.
+mail Bob=The Thing/Got your IC message. My char would definitely try to meet with you about it. Let's try to sync up this week if we can. If not I suggest we ((backscene/off-camera/say we ICly missed each other/G-Doc RP/whatever fits the circumstances)). I'm usually on weeknights after 9:30EST unless my kids lose their minds or work explodes.
Then I make it my priority to RP with Bob if he's around, over other RP. If it doesn't happen, hey that's life. There's always a way to move the plot along somehow, even if it means a few +mails back and forth negotiating an outcome.
But really, the most you're going to get out of me is "I'll try to be there". I just don't like to do hard RP commitments.
@lotherio Thanks for adding that. I deliberately only included the major softcode suites and widespread packages (like Myrddin's) that are pretty established/well-known. There are, of course, lots of other bits and pieces of softcode scattered around the 'net.
@thatguythere said in What is your turning point?:
no matter how important our scene may be I will take sure RP at 8 over possible RP later. Or even this tv program looks interesting at 9 over maybe RP at 9:30.
And I don't mind at all if someone does that. That's the whole point of it not being a commitment. Sometimes people multi-scene with alts to get around the "oh I started another scene five minutes before you logged in..." problem, but it's okay if they don't like to split their attention that way. I'm pretty flexible.
I'm not saying nobody should schedule RP. If that's what works for you, groovy. But for me - it's just added stress I don't need in my life over a game.
We RP because it's fun - it's the point of the game. But I'm a firm believer in the fact that RP should never be required. Our character's exist in the game world 24/7 and just because the players can't sync up, that doesn't mean the characters can't. You can always work something out. Tech can help too. Ares supports a Google-doc/play-by-post style of scene RP that lets you RP asynchronously. It's not as fun as the 'live' style, but it's handy when people have busy schedules and can't get together.
@skew said in Choosing a MU Server:
@rucket The TinyMUX softcode is continually changing
Yeah also consider... TinyMUX as a server platform has been stable for what - a decade? At some point I think it's reasonable to say "yep, we've gone as far as we're gonna go here". That doesn't detract from the platform's utility at the things it's good at, especially when a lot of the systems are softcoded anyway.
@krmbm said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
@three-eyed-crow said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
I sometimes wonder if web clients that spawned/separated OOC channels to a separate tab by default would help with this.
Like what Ares does?
I think @Three-Eyed-Crow maybe meant something more like what you'll see in many MMOs - a dockable chat window that can be chucked out of the way when you don't care, but otherwise stays unobtrusively off to the side somewhere.
Like in WoW for instance. (I can't believe I still have a screenshot from ages ago.)
Of course I'd love it if Ares had something cool like that. But at some point the web portal would just become so complex that maintaining it would be a full-time job. I already have one of those, thanks.
I prefer roll and count successes. I think that adding and subtracting dice for modifiers (as you'd find in nWoD, SR4, FS3 and various other systems) is a more intuitive way of handling stacked modifiers than trying to assess a singular raw difficulty of "easy, hard, etc.". And I like the way it allows for degrees of success - one success is fine for a passing grade, but extra ones get you more stars.
@arkandel said in Dice Mechanics:
Concealed from the player.
LOL - have you actually tried that? Geez, for as much flak as I get from people not liking FS3 mechanics, I got a gazillion times more on an older system when the mechanics were hidden, or even 1st edition FS3 when nobody understood the math. "What skill level should I take?" "Well, pick an adjective - are you average, good, or what?" "F the adjectives, girl -- what do the numbers mean?"
@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
That's one of the many, many interface improvements that even become possible with web-based clients.
Double post sorry. But it doesn't even need a web-based client. It just needs a client that's smarter than telnet(*). For instance, if there were a standard way for the game to say "yo, here's a room description" versus "here's some chat text" and "here's a pose", then the client could handle those things more sensibly. Right now the client just gets ((blob of plain ASCII text)) and we need pattern matching and other craziness to try to attach semantic meaning to it.
Once you had a standard, "smarter" client API then you could build web clients, mobile clients, and PC clients to utilize more advanced features for the servers that supported that API. (I put "smarter" in quotes because it's really not a client problem. Right now the clients are limited by the server interface.)
(*) Yes, telnet purists, I know you could technically implement a smarter API on raw telnet, but that would just be silly IMHO. It's 2018, just let telnet die already.
@lithium said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
The how is important because it helps make the world feel /real/, at least for some
I get that as a preference thing. What I'm saying is it doesn't resonate with me. I don't know if it's because I'm a coder and I automatically see behind the curtain on everything, or if it's just how my brain is wired or what, but I feel no immersion while MUSHing. So it's like trying to explain color to somebody who's color blind. I just don't get it. Like the folks who like an IC message system. I understand those people exist, but I don't grok that either. Just use pages or mail. I don't get how it makes a difference.
But yes, to OP's point - it absolutely unequivocally does make a difference to some segment of the MU population.
ETA since I missed a reply...
@thatguythere said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
grid is no one person's space (with the obvious exceptions of private builds) since it was created by a staffer or helper for the good of the game so it doesn't cause my issue.
I respect that. My personal hangup is the opposite. I would never join a public scene on grid without either an invitation or an awkward "hey mind if I join" page. But if somebody expressly says "Sure come on down" via the Open tag then I wouldn't feel that same issue. Everybody's different. No system - neither a grid nor a scenesys can please everyone.
@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
The new client will be the web browser you are using right now - there's no learning curve. Nor do you need to know the difference between telnet and http for that.
I was actually talking about next-gen desktop/mobile clients. Like Atlantis3 or MUSHClient2. I really don't see the majority of MUSHers switching over to web clients any time soon. Even if we made a game-specific web client that was awesome, it would only be for that game, and folks really don't want to have a bunch of different browser tabs open for different games. Logging, spawns, dockable windows, events, highlighting ... these are all features that our MUSH clients offer that are not very conducive to developing on the web. And trying to make a web client that's both richly-featured and easily customizable for folks who aren't pro programmers? Good luck.
@magee101 The telnet connection is under the hood of your MUSH client. MUSHclient or Potato wouldn't be able to utilize the new features I'm talking about unless somebody released a new version that did so, but I'm assuming server developers wouldn't break backwards-compatibility with old clients. That would be considerably short-sighted of them considering how many MUSHers are all: "You can have my SimpleMU when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers."
I like the idea of changing descs but I'm waaaaaay too lazy to write different versions of the same room desc. (Heck you're lucky to get one half-decent version out of me. :P) I've also found that a lot of folks either skim or don't read room descs, so I'm not sure how useful a changing one would be.
@thenomain said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:
It may have changed, but people started loving flavor emits, but came to hate them.
I hate them, along with weather emits. They either don't really add anything (do folks really care that a cool breeze whispered through the alley or a bird fluttered by overhead? maybe that's one of those immersion things I don't grok again...) or they're just incompatible with the RP already going on.
@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
See, the way I see it if we give MUSHers something that's better than what they have they will want to use it. But it needs to be good.
Yeah we'll just have to agree to disagree. I've gotten enough feedback on "playing via web" both here on MSB and in my discussions about Ares that I really don't think most people want to play that way. And the technical challenges of implementing all of Atlantis/Potato's features on web (and more - since it has to be better) seem so great that I don't think anybody's going to want to tackle that. Time will tell I guess.