Posts made by faraday

I get why folks like grids for the immersion factor, and that's cool. I'm not judging. If that's your thing, Penn/Tiny/Rhost or any MUD engine fits the bill nicely. Nobody's trying to take them away.

But looking forward to next-gen RP, consider having a map like this:

And a selectable list of locations - each with a wiki page (containing not only the desc you'd find on a MU grid but also maybe reference images, links to associated scenes, detailed background info, etc.)

I think most MUSHers would be able to understand where things are located and generate RP just fine without an actual "grid".

Personally I prefer it because I find it avoids some mental disconnects, like "an exit could take you to the next room or the next planet", being forced to create filler rooms to create a sense of space, and being forced to reconcile non-square locations onto a square n/s/e/w kind of map.

@sunny said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

Nobody needs one any more! Nobody plays on them anyway, we just choose rooms off a list." Unless that's been just hyperbole and the games DON'T actually exist.

Ares games have three different ways of starting scenes.

1. You can wander the grid to Central Perk, spin up a public/open scene, and wait for someone to join in.
2. You can do scene/start Central Perk and create a scene in a temp room representing Central Perk. This scene can be marked as private or public/open.
3. You can create a scene on the web portal and choose Central Perk from a dropdown list of locations. Same as #2, just the web version.

So yes, in scenarios 2 & 3, you don't actually need a "grid", just a list of available RP locations. Even so, I'm only aware of one Ares game that tried not having a grid, and they ended up creating one anyway to be more familiar.

@raemira said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

. Almost all of the scenes that were open were ones that were private and not open for anyone to joining them. That's very exclusionary.

It's the exact same command/screen to start a public scene as to start a private one. Public is actually the default setting.

What you're seeing is a shift in the preferences of the playerbase that has been building for ages. I've seen it on all kinds of games for years.

Ares just makes it a little more explicit than logging in and seeing everybody in private apartments, RP/TP rooms, OOC areas waiting for so-and-so to arrive, or scenes on grid where a page of "Mind if I join?" is met with "Well actually we're kinda in the middle of something..."

If you don't like it, that's cool - everyone's entitled to their preferences. But this is a social issue not a technological one, and you solve it with social means (staff leading the way by creating public scenes, making incentives for public scenes, encouraging public scenes, etc.) not technical ones.

@lotherio said in What is a MU*?:

I do consider it progression. Something newer, something fresher (to quote Jack Skellington); next gen.

Yeah but at the end of the day, a name is just a marketing tool. It's telling the consumers what to expect.

The very first version of Ares - which had no web portal - was virtually indistinguishable from PennMUSH to a player (on purpose). Some players thought it was PennMUSH. They don't care how the code is loaded behind the scenes. They care how they play the game.

You could use a PennMUSH server to make a MUD. You could run a MUSH-style game on TinyMUD. For me the game types are more about the player experience than the underlying tech. And since no two MUSHes (or MUDs or MMOs or video games in general) have exactly the same player experience anyway, there's some inherent variation.

But again, that's just me. There's no universal definition.

@ominous said in What is a MU*?:

What about Asheron's Call where the actions of players did affect the story on minor levels?

You're still not writing the story, you're participating in it. The story is already written by the game designers. It's the difference between writing a novel and reading through a choose-your-own-adventure story.

@il-volpe said in What is a MU*?:

I'm kinda puzzled as to what one needs to do to make it accessible for blind players. My first 'MUD' was LambdaMOO, and one of my first MU* friends is blind. He uses a screen-reader, the MOO didn't do anything about it.

Accessibility for the vision-impaired isn't a yes/no but more of a grading scale.

It's unlikely (but I guess not impossible) that a text-based game would be so inaccessible as to get an "F", but that doesn't mean there's nothing more we can do.

For instance, Ares has a 'screenreader' mode which, when activated, strips off the border lines before and after commands. This prevents the screen reader from having to read out "equals equals equals dash..." a bazillion times. It also condenses combat output so you aren't spammed quite so much. Things like that.

I've also done my best to make the web portal compatible with screen readers through aria markings and such. It's still a bit lacking because that's not my field of expertise and accessibility is hard, but I did at least try.

@arkandel said in What is a MU*?:

Consider an Ares game which - if you're logged on from the web - will display a generic picture of the room you're in. So when you visit the Blue Hearts bar you'll see a picture of a specific bar on the upper right corner.
Is it no longer a MU*?

I'm still not sure what you're going for, since again it's going to depend on your definition.

@Lotherio didn't consider Ares a MU from the get-go because it doesn't have softcode.

Someone else might or might not consider it a MU depending on whether the image replaced the text aspect.

Based on my original list, nowhere in there was "text only" one of my criteria. And in fact Ares does show pictures alongside the scenes (albeit for characters, not locations... that's more from convention than any technological limitation though; many MUs take place in settings where photos are not readily available so it's just not as much of a Thing.)

@coin That just comes down to what ports your work firewall has blocked. The fact that they're draconian enough to block the web portal ports but somehow missed the client ports says more about your work IT than the superiority of MU clients

(But seriously - if you can look at the browser console (View -> Developer -> Javascript Console in Chrome; other browsers vary) it will show the exact error. Maybe there's something weird going on. Feel free to PM me with details and maybe there's something to be done, but I doubt it.)

@squirreltalk There are browser extensions that let you highlight specific words. Ares ties into your browser/computer's notifications system, so whether that supports sounds will vary depending on your browser/OS.

@carma said in What is a MU*?:

Evennia even comes with accessibility options built in to its code.

So does Ares. Penn/Tiny/Rhost are effectively accessible because they're text-only without a web component built in.

So I'm not really sure there's any actual controversy here - we're just talking about what some potential future hypothetical game server that may or may not be a "MUSH" might include.

@arkandel There are those who have claimed that I shouldn't have called it AresMUSH because it's "not a MUSH". It doesn't have softcode, doesn't require a grid (though it allows one), allows asynchronous RP, has a web portal built in, etc.

At the end of the day, it's a MUSH because I created it and I named it a MUSH. Why? Because I personally felt that it had its roots in the same playstyle you'd commonly find in Penn/Tiny games.

@derp said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

I mean, don't get me wrong, the interface or whatever looks cool on this one. But. I think you may be underestimating that same gulf.

Given current technology, the gulf isn't very wide. That's why you can play a MUD with Atlantis just as easily as you can a MUSH. It's text-in, text-out, maybe a few triggers and bells and whistles. It's extremely similar.

As we start to move away to other platforms, though, I think the gulf widens. For example, MUDs are centered around grid exploration. Ares is centered around scene narratives. This can drive very different modes of user interaction. While that's just one prime example, that same difference in philosophy ripples through the entire interface.

That said, I think @Kestrel has a point that we should not be blind to what other game styles have done. In designing Ares, I looked at some of the nifty web MUDs (Iron Realms, Achea, etc.), some elaborate play by forum systems, Storium... there's a lot of different ways to do online text-based RP that we can draw inspiration from.

I don't think there exists a strict set of criteria that can definitively categorize the different types of online RP. Nor do I think there are even clear categories in the first place. It's more of a continuuum. Was Firan a MUD? A MUSH? Both? Neither? Does it even really matter?

Some of the hallmarks of why I prefer MU-style RP over other things like Storium, MUDs, play-by-forum, etc.

• Scene-centric narrative writing (full paragraph, cohesive stories)
• Continuous time (moves the plot along at a fixed pace relative to RL... this tends to drive more synchronous RP, though it's never been a requirement)
• Ongoing narrative (more of a TV show than a short story)
• OOC community and coordination
• RPG-lite chargen systems (don't get in the way, but allow some structure)
• A persistent world than can withstand (to a point) players coming and going.

I realize not all MUSHes have all these things, and some other styles of games have some of them too. I think it's like diagnosing an illness. You don't have to have ALL the symptoms, but the more you have, the more likely it is.

@kestrel said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

It's designed to be as user-friendly as possible for people with no experience coding etc., so the tradeoff is limitations in customisation. If you need to create custom commands and novel systems it won't suit your needs unless you can convince the person who made it to add that in, but if you're a builder who just wants to punch in your rooms, quests, combat and NPCs, it fits the bill.

You're basically describing Ares though, too. (minus the quests/mobs) You can have a game up and running with no coding experience whatsoever, as long as you're willing to accept the limitations in customization.

Even so, I'd say more than 50% of Ares games do end up with some degree of custom coding. That's the MUSH status quo.

So, yes, I agree with your general conclusion that steps are being taken in that direction - since I'm coding some of those steps myself

What @Lotherio describes in terms of being able to make the MUSH level of custom coding without actually learning code? There are systems with some degree of customization built in (Fate, FS3, TinyD6), but the idea that you could drag and drop some building blocks and make any arbitrary RPG system without touching code is just not feasible IMHO. It'd be nice, but the systems are just too complex and varied.

@ganymede said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

I think you underestimate how wonderful Ares is. Your product is excellent, but backwards compatibility is an added bonus, not, in my opinion, a requirement.

I appreciate the compliment but I think you underestimate the chicken and egg problem.

Yes, a sufficiently cool game might get players to give a radically unfamiliar system a try. But first you have to get the game runners to give it a try. With most MU runners already (rightfully) worried about getting enough critical mass to make their game succeed, that's a very hard sell.

If I had gone straight from PennMUSH to Ares with a web-only Play screen with player-handle logins back in 2007, Ares never would have even gotten off the ground. Gradual evolution is IMHO the only way we're going to make progress.

@kestrel said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

So I'd like to note that there actually are a few web-only MU* systems out there. One example is Written Realms.

That looks more like a MUD? But yes, certainly there are other types of online text RP. Storium and Rollgate are also web-only and have thousands of players.

The question isn't whether anyone would play a web-only MU, but whether enough of the existing MU community would do so to achieve critical mass for a game. My research and experience tells me no.

Storium and Forum RP is nice and all, but I still prefer the MUSH-style RP, and I want to play with my friends.

@derp said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

The CLI style interface is really about the only remotely manageable way to operate a game like this from an administrative level.

At least 90% of admin commands are available on the web portal for Ares, and are far preferable than the CLI for things like handling jobs, adjusting stats, setting up forums/channels/etc.

The remaining 10% could be done too, I've just been focused on other things.

@mietze said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

I would say stop using them as a scapegoat for not trying or when you fail

Seriously? You only have to look at the numerous threads here on MSB--including this one--to see that a crap-ton of people still prefer their MU clients over web. To say nothing of the polls, usage metrics, and umpteen bazillion conversations I've conducted over the fourteen years I've been working on AresMUSH.

Ares is successful because it innovates without alienating its core playerbase. That doesn't change the fact that backwards compatibility comes with a cost.

But if somebody wants to prove me wrong and make a web-only MU server, go for it.

@ganymede said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

You don't need to do anything.

I mean, sure, I can just go play video games instead.

But if I want people to actually use Ares, I'm kinda constrained by the attachment to old-school MU clients.

@arkandel said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

But here is the thing. Why is that an issue? As far as I'm concerned the 'need' for the hobby to move to web-based clients is in order to attract new players who might find the dedicated MU* clients intimidating or off-putting.

The need to support old-school MU clients is a tremendous limitation on new platforms and individual games.

It doesn't just double the workload (because you have to do everything twice - once for web and once for old clients) - it's more like 10x the effort. You have to make sure every feature supports two vastly different ways of interacting with the game. You have to teach and support two different ways of doing literally freaking everything. Two parallel sets of code to maintain and debug, and (for new coders) to learn. I cannot overstate what a huge problem this is.

Do we need desktop and mobile clients? Yes. But IMHO they need to evolve in a way that reduces these burdens.

@sunny notifications vary based on your browser, operating system, preferences, and whether the game has set up HTTPS. But FWIW I find even the best browser notification far inferior to the MU client blink. The same is true for slack and discord for me as well.

@greenflashlight said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:

The web client is too likely to lose connection and/or stop sending me notifications.

The connection will drop on mobile when the device goes to sleep - that’s a general limitation of mobile web apps. A mobile client is really the right thing there but it’s complicated because of game variations.

There are also connection limitations by some work or school firewalls, but nothing widespread that I’m aware of.

If folks are having issues please reach out via PM or on the Ares forum or discord with more details so I can look into the problem.