Posts made by faraday

My ideal plot scene time is 2 hours; max 3 hours. If I'm GMing and it goes longer than that, I apologize and consider it a failure. People get bored and tune out at around the 2.5 hour mark in my experience.

What @Valkyrie said about pose ground rules is important. I think it's the GM's job to herd people along if they're taking a long time to pose, and skip them if necessary. Don't let one player derail the plot for everyone.

@arkandel said in Plot session duration:

How easy is it for a PrP runner to predict how long a scene is likely to run in the first place?

So I take the opposite approach and make them take a certain duration rather than trying to predict how long they're going to take.

If the players are going too slow despite my efforts to speed them along, I might gloss over or change some of the things I had planned. In a combat scene, for instance, I might tune down the difficulty on the remaining NPCs so they get taken out quickly, or cancel a wave of reinforcements I had planned. If it's a meeting with the Commander, they might get called away suddenly with a "We'll have to pick this up next time..." Worst case, we can FTB and handwave the end.

OOC Time > Plot, in other words. In this regard it's not unlike a convention game that has a fixed timeslot.

@arkandel said in Plot session duration:

if IC it's a single uninterrupted adventure that gets broken down into two parts for OOC convenience how do you best handle concurrent on-grid RP taking place between those PrP sessions?

I do everything possible to avoid this situation because It sucks. The OOC convenience of breaking it down rarely outweighs the OOC inconvenience of being scene-locked or having to dance around continuity issues with scenes taking place out-of-time.

@arkandel said in Plot session duration:

How do you handle players having to go in mid-scene due to RL

Try to pose them out ICly if possible - they got called away, stepped out to take an important phone call, went to the bathroom, got knocked unconscious, their fighter started having sudden engine trouble, whatever.

Otherwise they become puppetted in the background.

@grapenut said in A new platform?:

Building and sending JSON data strings is trivial though.

For a single command, sure it's not so bad, but if you wanted to convert one of the existing code suites like mine or Volund's? It would be a massive undertaking.

@grapenut said in A new platform?:

As for sending JSON commands to the MUSH there's really no need and implementing a parser wouldn't be worth it. It's just formatted text so you might as well send it as regular text commands.

Except that then limits the web client to implementing only what you can do with regular text commands. For example - you couldn't do something like a character directory, because there is no single "get me a list of all characters" command. (You'd have to add one.)

Also websockets are useful, but a bit unreliable for the basis of a robust web implementation.

Just to be clear - I agree with you that you can make a web client with PennMUSH given enough time and effort. All I'm saying is that I don't think you can make "the same sort of web portal" as you said earlier. The interface limits what you can do.

@grapenut That’s cool but my general point was that you have to go implement all that from scratch. Existing commands like +who and page and +finger don’t do JSON intrinsically (right?).... and is there a way to send JSON commands //to// the game?

@bored said in A new platform?:

Maybe there's a barrier due to Ares association with FS3 and its own microcosm of players, but from a technical standpoint its ridiculously impressive

Thanks! I've mentioned it before, but since threads get buried I'll stress again that Ares is not tied to FS3. It comes with it, yes, but it's easily disabled if you want to use a different system. There's already a Cortex plugin and I'm working on a FFG Star Wars one.

I think a bigger barrier to adoption is that I'm still tinkering with it I want the installation/configuration/coding experience to be as painless as possible, which the beta testers are currently helping me with. There are a few games in development.

@apos said in A new platform?:

The format isn't really nearly as great in easily referencing old information, which puts an emphasis on immediacy, mostly because tools like mail or channel histories or whatever are so clunky

As you say, though, the immediacy is forced by the tool itself. There's nothing technical stopping it from working more like discord/slack/etc., where folks could be @-tagged and see responses later. We just need to make it work that way. Sometimes culture drives a tool but in this case the tool is driving the culture.

@surreality said in A new platform?:

(No, really. Out of sight ends up being not just out of the way, but completely out of mind for me. Oops.)

There are ways to address that with good UX design though. A middle ground between "out of sight out of mind where you forget it's even there" and "everything in one window where you miss pages because they're munged in with three other page convos, OOC chatter and poses."

@surreality said in A new platform?:

Making something that does what you describe, however, is not in the skillset of the majority of people who want to make a game.

Which is why I felt it was important to have a platform that did that out of the box. Because you shouldn't need to mess around with mail or finger code just to make a game. That's just silly.

Now if somebody wants the joy of building all that from scratch just to have it exactly the way they want it - more power to them. Evennia is better suited to that than Ares, though.

It's like LEGOs. Evennia is a pile of bricks, some of which have been pre-assembled into small components but mostly it's freeform. Ares is a pre-built LEGO castle, ready to play. Sure you can take the LEGOs apart and rebuild them, but it's probably going to be more work than just building your own castle the way you wanted it in the first place.

@thenomain said in A new platform?:

Except spawns.....We only tolerated it because it's all we had.

100% agreed.

@thatguythere said in A new platform?:

@faraday
I fail to see how those being split into two different windows would be better? All that does is make me flip between windows to see things.

Then there's nothing I can say to convince you. Continue enjoying the old systems.

@thatguythere To each their own, but that logic flies in the face of every principle of modern user interface design. Discord wouldn't get very far if it smushed every chatroom into one screen like:

<Public> Faraday waves, "Hi!"
<Sports> Seraphim says,  "So how about that game last night?"

MUSHers only tolerate it because that's what we're used to.

@thatguythere said in A new platform?:

My concern is that 90 percent of those graphical shells make the reading and writing of the text more of a pain than a simple command line. I am all for new players but not if the trade off for getting them is making my experience worse.

Wait - are you trying to say that Discord or Slack with its different channels and PMs separated visually is worse of an interface than a MUSH window with everything all smushed together with a single typing window? If so then I must respectfully disagree.

@derp said in A new platform?:

This hobby isn't about shiny things. It's about communication.

And if you look at Slack, or Discord, or Facebook Messenger, or this very forum we're talking on, or literally any other modern tool centered around communication you'll see that it's a graphical shell around, yes, text. Nobody is saying we're going to take away the need to read and write in a writing game. That would be silly. But we can absolutely (and IMHO must) change the fundamental tools that we use to do that reading and writing.

@arkandel said in A new platform?:

I don't think anything I mentioned is that uncommon - features like a live chat and content tabs are well documented and robust by now, and yet no MU is using them*.

They're not uncommon, but they're also not well-documented and robust. Almost nothing in web development can be considered well-documented and robust actually. It's all a hodgepodge of swiftly-changing technologies. But those kinds of features are not trivial by any stretch.

@lotherio said in A new platform?:

But it seems we're focused on re-inventing the wheel when web interface already has gadgets/wickets/platforms/extra/etc that could be made to work in a web frame along side a window client for the RP side that is the typical RP oriented things for the mush to work. There are tons of apps/gadgets/gizmos out there that could take a web frame and make it just as clunky as MUDlet, with options of control.

I looked into that very extensively when designing Ares and you're missing a few very critical points here:

1. It's a giant PITA to install and get all the moving parts working together. I mean, have you looked at the "Zero to MUX" thread lately? Just getting TinyMUX and MediaWiki installed is hideous. Throw in a forum and a ticket system and a Discord chat server and a Google calendar and whatnot on top of that? And then when some update happens and one piece stops playing nice with your system? Good luck.

2. People don't want to go to six different places to get the information for the game. They don't want to have to create six different logins. (And you might think single sign on would work but no - not gonna happen.)

3. We don't really need all that complexity. MUSH mail and bb posts are pretty simple. We don't need a whole email system or forum software.

So yes, we're reinventing the wheel to an extent - but only a small, simple wagon wheel and for good reasons.

Is it saving any work, becoming easier? Or is it just adding more options that equate to more work?

It really depends on what you want. Using Ares with FS3 can be installed and configured without touching a single line of Ruby code. Installing community plugins (which will include several other skill systems) may take a few code tweaks, but the instructions tell you exactly which lines of code to change to plug them in. So if that meets your needs, then yes - it absolutely saves work even though there's a GUI involved.

But for new code? Of course it's going to be more work to do ASCII+GUI as opposed to just ASCII or just GUI. But we're kinda stuck with that as long as we're forced to design hybrid systems that support both interfaces.

@arkandel said in A new platform?:

lthough my preference is for something that generally looks like a traditional MUSH client (an input line at the bottom, a main window for poses) with all of the additional UI elements added to it(a Hangouts-like chat list on a retractable sidebar on the right that you can hide, tabs for 'channels', etc) or on demand. Do I want to send you a mail? I right click on your name, pick that from a context menu and do so.

Yeah that all sounds great, but here we run into some practical issues. We want to have a game server that:

• Is easy to install with very little technical experience.
• Is easily extensible for whatever custom systems a game wants to add on.
• Supports a hybrid interface with multiple inputs.
• Has a really kick-butt user interface with all kinds of fancy UI elements.

Many of those goals are mutually-exclusive. The fancier you make something, the more complex it gets. The more moving parts you add, the harder it is to install. And so forth.

I think we have to be a bit realistic with our expectations.

@thenomain said in A new platform?:

What were you talking about?

I was talking about how Ares provides all the cornerstones of a basic MUSH setup ready to go out of the box. Of course if you dislike the forum page, for example, you could re-design it. (That's what I thought you were talking about.) But that redesign is not necessary and thus I don't consider it to be generating any kind of "development spike". On the contrary, I think removing the need to code up all that stuff just to get a MUSH off the ground reduces the overall development time.

@golgoth said in A new platform?:

Shit, I don't know Ruby / Ruby on Rails and now I'm sitting here thinking how hard it might be to implement all of this stuff for AresMUSH.

FWIW you don't have to - it's already implemented. Web-based mail, bbs and jobs come out of the box.

@thenomain said in A new platform?:

@faraday said in A new platform?:

If the bulk of the web portal and basic systems are already built

Giving us even more to re-design to bring the hobby into last decade.

:helpless shrug: If folks are going to re-design mail, BBS, finger/profile, repose and whatnot just for the hell of it when it's already built for them, they're not my target audience. Go use Evennia. Seriously. (I don't mean that in a bad way either. Evennia is a great building kit for making your own thing.)

Ares is for the folks who see no reason to re-invent the wheel just to make it look a little different, and just want to run a game. Take all the pre-built stuff, add whatever game-specific stuff you need (which for most games will be very little if we have a stable of different CG systems ready to go) and you're off to the races.

@thenomain said in A new platform?:

Leave the text window the text window. ... It's our plus-commands that are the problem.

Yeah, that's basically the approach I've taken with Ares. You can RP strictly through the web portal, but it's a little clunky and I don't expect most people will. The text window will be the primary mechanism for starting a scene and posing and that's perfectly fine because both of those things are principally text-driven activities with very simple command sets.

But does somebody new to MUSHing really need to learn +bbpost <board>=<subject>/<message> when they can read and post to the forums on a web portal without disrupting their RP? Even among the veterans, I know there are a lot of us who prefer to read the forums like, y'know, forums instead of typing +bbnew over and over again. Why do chargen with +raise this and +lower that when you can just click a few buttons on a web form? Those are the places where I think there's mileage to be had.

@thenomain said in A new platform?:

We could absolutely hook HTML5/CSS3 into it, and probably fairly easily, but now you need someone to run the game, someone to code the game, and someone to UI the game. These can overlap, but we're adding to, not simplifying, the requirements for entry.

For a lot (if not most) programmers these days, HTML/CSS skills are part of the standard package. It doesn't take a whole lot of expertise to make a fill-in form for your chargen. If the bulk of the web portal and basic systems are already built, adding just a few new UI elements for your custom stuff shouldn't be a giant obstacle. (If you're talking about Firan levels of custom code, well then yeah... stuff gets complicated. But that's not most games.)

@grapenut said in A new platform?:

@three-eyed-crow Don't forget, with the websocket client you can make the same sort of web portal with any MUSH.

Not effectively though. You can do a basic web client, but to do more advanced integrations requires a more advanced interface. Just shipping commands like "WHO" to the game and trying to parse ASCII text back out is not going to get you very far.

@lotherio said in A new platform?:

It feels like this part is being ignored in upgrades.

I wouldn't say it's being ignored, just that we have different views of the problem. To me, even if you have somebody who's interested in reading/writing/storytelling/collaborating, they're going to be severely put off by a 1980's era interface. I've heard this from a number of folks first-hand.

I mean, think about the next generation. My kids have never seen a command-line interface in their lives. They approach every screen like it's a touch screen. This is the next generation of potential MUSHers. Even if the hobby still centers around writing, you've got to meet them halfway with an app they can relate to. IMHO.

@bored said in A new platform?:

I think the 'the syntax has to be completely the same or the oldbies will rebel' is... exaggeration by the oldies for the sake of hating change (like most people do). Push come to shove, I do think people will play where they can play, so long as its achieving the functionality they desire.

To some extent I agree, but there are countless examples of people doing this - avoiding playing on Penn or Tiny because of the different channel syntax, acting like Rhost is some mysterious alien land, getting all up in arms over command syntax being different on one game versus another, etc.

I also agree that complex command syntax can't fundamentally be made much (if at all) simpler. But I think about 30 years of user interface design has proven pretty thoroughly that you can represent those complex interfaces in a far more intuitive way with GUI.

I mean... setting combat/stance Evade, combat/weapon Rifle=Scope is pretty simple as far as command lines go. But remembering all those commands compared to a GUI? No comparison IMHO.

@friarzen said in A new platform?:

Only the most intrepid newbies are willing to go through that learning curve.

It's kind of a catch-22 really. Only the most intrepid newbies are willing to suffer through the learning curve to use the old syntax. Only the most intrepid veterans are willing to try a new syntax - or so they say. When push comes to shove, if more games start using new platforms, will they go where their friends are? Time will tell I guess. Otherwise we're pretty stuck with the status quo.

What it comes down to, though, is looking at what makes a MUSH. As @bored mentioned, it's the combination of RPG elements and social elements, which makes it pretty unique. There's also the real-time aspect, which is both a blessing (the faster pace and ability to be entertained for a block of hours is what a lot of us love about MUSHes) and a curse (it's daunting to new players and those who can't make that kind of time commitment.)

@jennkryst said in A new platform?:

@lotherio Versatility for it's own sake is problematic. Not to mention sometimes a command line is different because a coder just happened to write it that way (or may have been forced to write it that way because of things in the code, I don't know how that sorcery works).

Mostly it's just because these code systems were developed in parallel and didn't always know about each other. (Or when they did know, didn't care to strive for commonality.)

I get that not everybody will like the standard Ares command set, but I think that having a standard command set is a good thing for MUSH ease of use. Many games will have custom systems, of course, but by keeping the basic day-to-day commands (mail, page, channels, meetme, friends, etc.) consistent across games, it lowers barriers to entry.

FWIW these issues were discussed at length in this thread:
http://musoapbox.net/topic/1959/alternative-formats-to-mu

@apos Yeah Ares does that too, but like you said - ALL command-line interfaces suffer from that basic problem, which is why they went the way of the dino in mainstream computing ages ago. As long as MUSHers cling to playing through the old MU clients, it's not a fully solvable problem. Offering alternatives, like dedicated mobile apps or a web interface, can address some of it.