Posts made by faraday

@sab just don’t put he hash as the very first letter of a line and it shouldn’t be interpreted as a heading.

@arkandel said in A theme-less, CGen-less game:

Nothing works other than @mail since and no one can enter uninvited.

Granted it’s been awhile since I’ve fiddled with softcode, but it seems like that would require some hardcode mods. Good luck!

@arkandel said in A theme-less, CGen-less game:

Correction. With a bit of effort to focus on that 'isolating sandboxes' part I'm pretty confident it would work since a troll wouldn't be able to reach those playing in any way in-game yet genuine friends could do it by messaging in MSB itself.

How? When you think of all the ways that there are to communicate in a MU - pages, mails, channels, bbs... I'd think you'd want at least some of them to work within the game (to coordinate with people within a sandbox) otherwise it would be a PITA to play. To try to restrict that to only work within sandboxes seems like it'd be super-hard in Penn/Tiny. Slightly less hard in Ares but still a pain.

@arkandel said in A theme-less, CGen-less game:

if this would work at all it would need to be rudderless or ran by trustworthy inmates.

What from the experiences on MSB would suggest this place could be rudderless? Unless you want it to be HogPitMUSH, which... yeah, no thank you.

I don't really see what this offers that you can't already do on the other social sandbox MUSHes, so I don't see the need/value personally.

@skew said in Spirit Lake: An Original Modern Fantasy Game:

@faraday @Tat Would be great if we could find some way to explain why it wants to send notifications.

Unfortunately the browser notification standard doesn't allow you to tell them why you want to show notifications. Nothing I can do about that.

@rucket - @tat was updating the https security certificate and there was a slight hiccup with the game. It should be all working now.

@tat has done a lot of snazzy work integrating the magic system with FS3. Kudos. Good luck!

@arkandel You might consider setting up a wikidot wiki for it. Free, less resource requirements, you can allow membership easy for gamerunners to add their own games, and you can transfer ownership more easily if MSB ever needs to switch hosts or something.

@paris Yes, contrast is also important. Especially on a MU environment where you only have a handful of colors to work with and need to handle both light and dark backgrounds. In Ares, each game can configure their color schemes, so that's more of an implementation detail than something central to the engine. Also, many clients let you customize your color values, so you can adjust if a particular game makes poor choices. But still good for folks to be aware of.

@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.

@sparks Thanks. I’ve done my best with general s/w accessibility practices, but it’s good to know how close to the mark it is and what MU-specific features might help.

If you or someone you know plays MUSHes with a screen reader or other accessibility device, I would love to get feedback about how to make AresMUSH more accessible to everyone. Feel free to PM me or post here or on the Ares forums.

If you haven't played Ares, you can log onto the test server (formerly BSGU, now a sandbox) or check out Chontio, @skew's new Star Wars game running on Ares.

@thenomain said in Poll: Are MU* video games?:

Nobody can define “game”, and nobody can define “play”. We can feel it, we know the shape of it, and we know what we accept, but the best we can do it agree on a rough definition, or clarify when that definition doesn’t meet our own.
Q: What is art?
A: I don’t know, but I know what I like.

This. We can ramble on about our own opinions all day long for fun, but you're never going to get a definitive answer to "is X a Y" without having an agreed-upon definition of what a "Y" is. And we don't.

@tinuviel said in What drew you to MU*?:

That bit, yes. I'm talking more about the actual telemetry, rather than relying on more traditional feedback that we usually do.

I don't understand what you're objecting to re: telemetry. Gathering metrics about who actually uses/does what as opposed to just trying to gauge it with gut feel?

@tinuviel I think that's pretty much game design 101. If a significant percentage of people are interested in X, staff is probably going to do more X. If hardly anyone is interested in Y, staff can either try to figure out why and adjust it (if it's something they think has value) or ditch it. That's not something unique to Arx or Blizzard.

@arkandel I think that in these cases though (MMOs and MUSHes), the activity itself is very different than it was 15, 20 years ago.

With MMOs we've gone from a subscription model to a micro-transaction model. You also have a vast gulf between people who are just starting and the dinos who have been there forever. These kinds of things fundamentally shift the way the game is played. The influx of "casual" gamers to the video game industry has changed things as well.

I think a lot of that applies to MUSHes too. Sure, I like different things now than I did decades ago. But the games are different too. There are fewer games to choose from, less random RP, more "appointment RP", more metaplot, stuff like that.

@misadventure said in Poll: Are MU* video games?:

Ascii is a form of graphics and so not a differentiator.

I mean it really comes down to how esoteric you want to get about the definition of "graphics". All text on modern displays is converted into a raster image once you get low enough down into the video driver. But does that really mean "text = graphics" on any practical level or in common parlance? Not at all.

I voted "no", but it kind of depends on your definition:

A video game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a video device such as a TV screen or computer monitor. (Wikipedia)

Text is technically "visual feedback".

But compare that with various dictionary definitions:

an electronic game in which players control images on a video screen
any of various interactive games played using a specialized electronic gaming device or a computer or mobile device and a television or other display screen, along with a means to control graphic images.

There aren't really any "graphic images" being controlled here.

Mostly I just think that it's not what leaps to mind when people say 'video game'.

@kanye-qwest said in What drew you to MU*?:

I worked all night at an extremely undemanding job, in front of a PC, and I was bored. A friend was like "I stay up all night playiing this text game, come try it" and I was like "sounds fake but ok".

That's similar to my experience. I worked the late-night shift at the college computer lab. We couldn't install video games, and there wasn't much of an internet to surf at the time, but I could MU from a terminal window.

ixokai (RIP, sniffle) posted a logger system for PennMUSH. It makes the log output available in a format that folks can just copy/paste onto a wikidot wiki (like Marvel 1963's). It's not automated, but it makes it pretty easy for players to post logs.

I don't know how far you are into actually coding the SR-specific code or how attached you are to PennMUSH, but you could also consider AresMUSH (still in beta), which lets players share logs seamlessly with the integrated web portal. (example)