Posts made by faraday

@Rook said in New Start Databases:

I have to admit, never have I seen a SGP/Muxcore survive the coder joining and starting to build.

Maybe those ones don't (I'm not too familiar with them myself), but I think the larger code suites like FS3/Theno/Volund do. If someone wanted to start from scratch, they would start from scratch and not use one of those in the first place.

So it comes down to what value is being provided by your "starter DB". Are you going for just a tinkering platform or more of a "game in a box"?

@Rook said in +poseorder and +repose:

What is wrong with just a simple OOC request that someone do a little paged playback? That was always the way it was done before...

There's nothing wrong with that, but having an automated system just cuts down on the number of times you need to ask and page. Many people find it convenient. YMMV.

@Thenomain said in New Start Databases:

@RnMissionRun

I tried porting the system to Mux before. Without regedit(), forget it.

regedit() is only used in a handful of places though, and at a glance they all seem pretty non-essential (like printing MUSH code to a wiki format for archiving bbposts). The paren-matching and comm-escaping issues @Ashen-Shugar mentioned were the biggest headache for me because they're freaking everywhere. That and there were subtle differences with permissions/ownership and stuff like that.

Kinda feel like this is veering off topic of the original idea of a starter DB, but since the OP mentioned portable code maybe it's still relevant.

@RnMissionRun Four then. It's totally possible, technically-speaking, but is anyone really that desperate for FS3 + MUX that they need to suffer? Spare yourself the pain

@Ashen-Shugar said in New Start Databases:

• Penn's parser does not require ending parenthesis, bracets, and brackets, no matter how many levels deep you are. Which... I never figured why, but makes for lazy code that is non-cross portable...

Well I can't speak for the original code devs' intentions, but I think when you consider the state of MUSHcode back when it was first developed, and the simplicity or what folks were doing with it (falcon controllers and the like), it simply wasn't a big deal. It was actually convenient, because you could make a mistake in your paren matching and the parser wouldn't care. And then of course once they had made that original design, they then had a body of code that would've been broken if they ever changed it.

Also, cross-portability wasn't really a big thing. TinyMUX was way different than Penn back then, but now they've sort of come together compatibility-wise and people are more apt to want to bring stuff across.

Anyway, you're now the third person to have tried to port my codebase over to another platform and given because it was too much of a pain. I'm pretty much declaring it a lost cause at this point And with all my efforts focused on AresMUSH, I'm not terribly concerned if it ever makes it to the RHost or MUX platforms. But thanks for trying.

I've had this for awhile with my FS3 codebase for folks wanting something for PennMUSH. Even if you don't like the FS3 skills system, you can just uninstall that module and keep the rest of the globals and stuff. I know several people have used it, so I'm sure starter DBs for other platforms would get some mileage.

The game wasn't perfect, but Andi and Orion surely tried. They were two of the nicest staffers I've come across. Even when I was criticizing some of their decisions, they were receptive and good-natured about it. How often do you find that particular trait among MU staff?

And yeah, I think centering plot around their PCs was a thing early on, but they seem to have deliberately made an effort to tone that down in the latter 2/3rds of the game's tenure. They were more foils than stars while I was there.

So say what you will about the game itself - heaven knows it frustrated the heck out of me sometimes - but I don't agree with all the bashing of A&O personally.

@ThatGuyThere said in Historical MU*s:

I think a lot of the reason for that is the most westerns in other mediums are set in that era as well. So western fans tend to think of that as the default setting.

Yes. As someone who's run a game set in the 1860's and constantly having people RPing like it was the 1880's, I shudder to imagine what a game set in the 1840's would have to deal with. The west was SO different then.

Here's my cookies system. It probably doesn't do exactly what you want but you could probably adapt it.

Technically it depends on my core systems, but IIRC there are just a few functions it needs, like line() and padstr() from the Global Functions.

@Sunny It doesn't have to happen often for it to be a big disruption. I've seen just one person leave and abandon 6 characters and have it completely derail a whole bunch of plots and leave a whole bunch of other players hanging because their boss/BFF/SO/frenemy/whatever is no longer there. It's a legitimate problem that can strike at any time without warning. And it's very easily prevented with an alt limit.

If folks don't think it's a big enough deal to have a policy? Fine. Your game, your headache. But I reject the assertion that someone quitting due to RL issues or getting bored or finding a new game is somehow the result of bad staffing, or the blanket statement that alt policies solve nothing. This particular problem? They solve.

@Sunny said in How Many Alts Would An Alt User Alt If An Alt User Could Use Alts:

Making a rule to deal with a single (or a few) problem player(s) rather than actually dealing with the issue itself is bad staffing.

I have not yet seen a problem with 'alts' presented that is not just a symptom of some other issue that people are too fucking lazy to bother addressing.

Um.... how is "people leaving a game and abandoning a half-dozen characters" a consequence of bad staffing? People leaving games without warning is a universal constant among MUSHers. Players go, and when they do, it affects a bunch of other players.

@Thenomain said in How Many Alts Would An Alt User Alt If An Alt User Could Use Alts:

@faraday

This happens quite, quite often on WoD games, and I was wondering your secret.

I've never played WoD games so it's hard to contrast. But from what I've gathered, there's a lot more politicking and subtle or even overt PvP than tend to occur in my genres.

I mean... so you want to play a Lieutenant AND a Private in the BSG marine company? Is there really a huge potential for abuse there? Even if your Lieutenant tried to pull some shenanigans by letting your Private get away with something he shouldn't have, there are always other officers further up the chain of command to review the AAR and say "Hey wait a minute..." And honestly I get way more problems with that sort of thing from people who aren't alts but are just OOC friends.

So just generally, I give people the benefit of the doubt and deal with problems when they arise. Really hasn't been a problem for me.

What HAS been a problem with alts for me? Say you get a problem player. OK, he's got one alt. Irritating but not the end of the world. You let him have four alts? OMG such a headache.

Also when people leave the game. I'm just going to pull a number out of my butt and say that the average character has 4 really deep meaningful relationships with other characters. If that player leaves the game and has 2 chars, that's 8 people affected. The more alts you allow, the wider the ripple effect is. MU players are notoriously fickle with games, so this is a big problem for me.

I've also personally observed that alts get 'shelved' when you allow a bunch, just because most people don't have the time to play that many. While that's great for the AltPlayer, it's not so great for the people with those meaningful relationships with them. So in part the limit is trying to manage the monkeysphere effect of people getting left high and dry when their boss/friend/SO/nemesis is never around to interact with.

@Thenomain said in How Many Alts Would An Alt User Alt If An Alt User Could Use Alts:

@faraday

Have you on your games then you've allowed alts ever had problems with alts affecting one another more directly than you were comfortable with?

Don't recall one. Which is not to say it never ever happened even once in 20 years, just that it wasn't a big enough deal to be memorable, or to affect a policy decision.

@Arkandel said in How Many Alts Would An Alt User Alt If An Alt User Could Use Alts:

I don't care about alt policies either way personally since I never could pull off having more than one active alt at any given time. But I never found restrictive policies to serve the purpose they were supposed to on paper.

I think it depends on what purpose they were supposed to serve on paper.

I favor a one-alt policy simply because it mitigates the impact caused by a player leaving. That seems to be a pretty concrete purpose that is pretty well served by only allowing one alt instead of, say, four.

@bored I think @Thenomain pointed it out somewhere else, but a greedy algorithm doesn't necessarily minimize unused dice that the GM could snag and use against you. So what you want is basically a "maximize raises while minimizing unused dice" algorithm, and that's not straightforward.

Given a library that helped you with permutations (off limits for Griatch's challenge) and a real programming language that could handle deep recursion without choking and dying, I'm guessing you could do it. But I would shudder to even try to implement my already imperfect algorithm in MUSHcode, let alone a more sophisticated one.

@bored said in 7th Sea 2nd Edition:

@faraday
For either of you, I'm not entirely sure why it's unsolvable.

See this thread. If you can do better, knock yourself out. I'm sure @Thenomain will have some kind of prize or something Probably

@bored Roll and keep is easy. 2nd ed (at least the preview version) used this crazy combo system of making "raises". As @Thenomain said, you can get close, but getting it exact in MUSHCode I would say is practically impossible.

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.

@Ganymede said in Are MU* videogames:

When my friends ask me if I've played good video games, I don't get into my MU*ing. So, I clearly don't consider them video games.

That's where I'm at. Yes, technically, they're video games by some definitions. Depends on which one you use. In casual conversation, no I don't talk about them as "video games".

@Thenomain said in Dreams to Reality:

final edit: Which may be the source of my "hair shirt" feeling when dealing with Penn. Again, A+++ to Javelin and Faraday and so on, but I sometimes can't shake the feeling that there is an undercurrent of professional superiority from other Penn coders based on what appears to me to be nothing more than feature set. I dunno.

I don't really interact with other Penn devs, so I can only speak for myself. I don't see Penn as superior to MUX. It's just different. There are a few things that Penn has but MUX doesn't, and vice-versa, but they're largely identical. As a player, the differences are mild annoyances (like fumbling around to try and set up com aliases to mimic Penn's system). As a coder, though, the differences remind me too much of browser compatibility crap, requiring workarounds for stuff that's different just 'cause it's different. Dealing with that is just too much like work.