@ganymede said in General Video Game Thread:
Play the motherfucking game, I figure, and fuck that impatient-ass bullshit.
It's not always about impatience though. For folks who just don't have a lot of free time to play, stuff like that can turn a game from a hopeless slog into something modestly enjoyable. If it's a MMO type game with levels, it can also enable you to continue to play with your more-active friends instead of getting left solo-ing in the dust.
@ganymede said in Forgiveness in Mushing:
I guess this might speak to how detached I am to certain parts of this hobby, but if this stuff is actually commonplace,
I think it varies by game. I haven't seen a lot of that "mean girl" nonsense either, either personally or in terms of player complaints.
There are certainly some instances of what @Ghost described as "red card" offenses, but the vast majority of player disputes boil down to the MU equivalent of "He shot me!" "No he didn't!" playground nonsense that escalates into toxicity and grudges. "OMG he broke my toy / min-maxed more than me to get ahead / made me look bad / etc. He's the absolute worst and now I will behave like a jerk about it!"
@arkandel said in Forgiveness in Mushing:
A number of things.
I think Ark hit it on the head for why the hobby is kind of messed up, socially-speaking. A tabletop RPG crew may get overly invested in their characters. A tabletop wargame crew may get overly competitive. But those people still have to look each other in the eyes week after week and (generally) get to know each other pretty well. Internet gaming doesn't have that very important social filter.
I've forgiven MUSH folks many times. Sometimes I tend to be a little too forgiving, actually, and just end up getting burned again in the same way by the same person. I'd choose that over endlessly holding grudges, but there's probably a happy middle ground I haven't found yet.
Frankly the idea of a RL Anger thread in the "Constructive" forum has always baffled me a bit. How do you rage constructively? Moving it to the hog pit might alleviate a number of concerns.
I have also looked at Discord/Slack/etc. for ideas and mentioned it various times this conversation's come up. A lot of people just RP in Discord, so it's a good starting point for looking at the general paradigm.
@arkandel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:
It'd sure be nice if I could fix it for more than just the wiki.
Yeah, that's the kind of thing I was talking about earlier. My scene system has a feature that lets you amend your last pose. On the web, it actually edits it, as you'd expect. (Like I edited this post just now.) But in the game, the only option is to re-emit the fixed version.
The same is true of text display. On web I can use full Markdown. I can do bold and italics and links and even multi-tab displays. On a MU client, I get fixed-width ASCII with some ansi colors. Folks have asked me to display wiki pages in-game on Ares. There's nothing technical preventing me from doing so, it's just going to look like crap because the MU client can't handle the formatting.
In both cases, we're talking about the exact same functionality (edit a pose / show a wiki page) but the user-friendliness of said feature is far, far greater on a web client than on an old client.
Note: I'm just using web as an example here because it's already been done. If someone were to make a new desktop client you could do the same thing. The current clients just can't do it because they work like old terminal windows.
@wildbaboons said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:
It's seems odd to argue over how mu access from a corporate environment would be allowed but every commercial firewall I can think of is deny by default for traffic
Well Derp's right that there absolutely are places that would allow SSH over port 4201 (which is not a common attack vector) and yet also have a web filter for productivity reasons. They really do exist, but I agree with you that they're in the minority. That's why web MU clients have caught on.
Though it's worth noting that a lot of work places ban javascript and websockets too. Heck, I had one person whose work banned the Bootstrap CDN for reasons I can't fathom. There's never going to be a solution accessible to every corporate firewall, but I also don't think that should really be a driving goal of any new MU server.
@thenomain said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:
I can only assume that you did it to be More Correct(tm).
*shrug*
Or maybe it was because I misunderstood the point you were trying to make, given the context of other remarks surrounding yours in the discussion. But by all means assume the worst. That always gets us far.
@derp said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:
False. Many of the people in this hobby use SSH because...
Evidence? MUSHers are not the average consumer/gamer, which is who I was referring to. The average person has never even heard of SSH let alone are in the habit of downloading PuTTY to try to circumvent network firewalls at work.
CLIs have a place in the tech world. There are usability and automation rationales for including them, though even many IT folks are shifting away from them in favor of other tools. I agree with the Wired article that CLIs are not going away any time soon, but even that article points out (emphasis mine):
Though the average computer user has no need for a command line, it's still an essential tool for developers and system adminstrators who require access to guts of our machines
If you're marketing a game system solely to computer admins, developers and veteran MUSHers - sure, by all means, stay with CLI. But that's not really what this thread is about.
@tinuviel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:
Do we need a long-term plan?
Depends on the "we". The average MUSHer, certainly not. But for folks like me, the Evennia team, and @Kumakun who are investing in design for the next generation of platforms - I should hope so.
@thenomain said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:
this “telnet is antiquated” talk should stop. People use SSH daily
I agree with everything else you said, but this one thing...
Highly technical people use SSH daily. Your average consumer/gamer simply doesn't use anything like that on a regular basis. Command-line interfaces are already a barrier. When you consider that there's an entire generation of kids growing up now who are frustrated when a screen isn't a touchscreen, this problem is only going to get worse over time.
Obviously text is still going to be the focal point of play because it's a writing game, but chaining our games to a CLI is a bad long-term plan IMHO. People say 'telnet' as a shortcut, which is bad, but it's not the protocol it's the human interface. You could switch it over to JSON HTTPS on the back-end and that doesn't solve the fundamental problem.
@tnp said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:
And for simple text based gaming, what do we really need? A few extra bells and whistles don't cut it.
People find value in different things. Stuff like dual input windows, not having garbage on your screen because SimpleMU doesn't support the unicode standard used by every modern software program, separating OOC spam and channels and pages stuff in a way that doesn't require you to bend over backwards doing regex's. Incorporating things that are in every chat program under the sun - @mentions, markdown formatting, heck even something as simple as being able to edit a pose or page after you've sent it. And that's not even beginning to touch the sort of interactive things that can move us beyond the type of bbpost <board>=<subject>/<message> commands that are completely alien to an entire generation of people.
There's way more we can do than 'bells and whistles', but it's going to take time to get people shifted.
@derp said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:
I guess this depends on what you mean by 'nicely'.
From talking to several SimpleMU users, the definition of "nicely" is "How SimpleMU does it" 
Which is not the same way Potato does it, apparently.
And 
to @Tat and the other SimpleMU users, because when I had a Windows machine I held onto my precious SimpleMU.exe long after onlineroleplay.com went away. So I get it.
My main point is - Developers ignore backwards compatibility at their own peril. (Speaking of which, I'm gonna make the smartquotes thingy we talked about a configurable option.)
@tinuviel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:
Not enough to change, as @faraday has said.
I think that change happens slowly. I mean, every so often you get the lightning bolt, but most of the time it's gradual. We didn't go from touchtone phones to "everybody has an iPhone in their pocket and home phones are pretty much defunct" overnight, right? You convince the early adopters first, then they spread the word, and so on and so forth until eventually, hopefully, you hit a tipping point. (There's an awesome TED Talk on this idea, btw.)
But the thing is - MUSHing is a community-driven hobby. You can't convince the early adopters to adopt if they can't play with their friends. And their friends, not being early adopters themselves, are still going to be using Potato and Atlantis and (sob) SimpleMU.
@arkandel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:
People don't know what they want until you show it to them.
Many people know what they don't want, though. Also, I have shown it to them. But hey - if somebody wants to try it, I sincerely wish them luck. I just figured I'd share 6+ years of consistent feedback that led me to maintain the old-school-client compatibility in Ares.
@tinuviel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:
haven't found a compelling argument or benefit to change what I know to something entirely new.
That wasn't what I was asking though. I was asking, specifically, if I (or someone) opened up a new MUSH that looked cool but you couldn't use your usual client, you could only use a web browser or some other new-fangled client - would you try it?
The overwhelming response to that question in polls is "no". That pretty much dooms any attempts to do something radically new unless you want to say "screw you veterans". But if you do that... who exactly is going to run and play on these hypothetical newfangled games?
@tinuviel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:
I'd say that it's less that we absolutely will not, more that we absolutely don't see the need. Speaking for myself, at the very least.
If I made a "MUSH" that could only be played via the web, would you even give it a look? Or would you dismiss it as some variant of PBP forum RP that isn't your thing?
If you would try it out, then you're in the minority (based on polls here on MSB and my own personal surveys and feedback via Ares). That's not a criticism, btw. That's just reality.
@arkandel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:
Please answer it honestly. We all know newcomers can stick around despite a traditional MU*'s trappings; can you imagine many stick around because of them?
None. And far more are driven away by them.
But the simple, inescapable fact is that the overwhelming majority of veteran MU players will not switch to a new client. I've still got people reporting Ares issues with SimpleMU for pete's sake, and that hasn't been supported in, like, a decade.
So for all my "What defines a MU" philosophizing -- unless you want to make a game for only newcomers, you're stuck with what we've got.
@tinuviel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:
The grumpy old people clinging to outdated foundations and standards.
Then web-mu is definitely out of bounds
But if you instead define it as:
Then sure, why not have a web MU?
ETA: That was a MUSH definition so I guess general MU* would be even broader. You hopefully get my drift.
@tinuviel But both are nevertheless paintings. It really depends on what you see as the defining quality of a "MU*" and I don't think there's universal agreement on that point.