Best posts made by Griatch

I noticed I was mentioned, then realized that was a lot of pages ago...

I agree generally on there being opportunities to improve on UX in these games, but as usual it depends on the goal with your game. In Evennia's case we see people both from the Mud and Mush worlds (as well as some other sub genres). Some can't wait to replace Evennia's "mux-like" defaults for something they deem better in their view. Others instead complain that Evennia is not similar enough to their game of choice and do their damndest to reverse- port it.

Now, in Evennia's case the user can by default alias commands they don't like to something they prefer ( including remapping inputs, defaults etc), and store that with their player account. So at least in theory this allows users to make their ui experience more suitable to their tastes without coder intervention. Then again, the same is possible in most respectable clients so it's hardly revolutionary.

In the next Evennia version we are following Ares' lead and are allowing you to ignore prefixes you specify. So unless you explicitly create a command @desc, but call it just desc, then you could use @desc, +desc etc and it would all be identified as the same command. A small, but practical way to sidestep the legacy of those commands while retaining familiarity for the old hands (kudos to @faraday for the idea).

With the availability of web clients, I can't help but think we have only touched upon the possibilities with making awesome UI:s for this genre of games. Like @Ashen-Shugar I'm not primarily a front-end guy, but it's something I hope to explore further.
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Griatch

The original post didn't mention if @HelloProject had any code experience or willingness to learn some. But I note people in the thread are referring to themselves as wanting to make a game without any coding. Which is fine, by all means.

But for the record, Ruby (for Ares) or Python (for something like Evennia) are languages that are simple to learn. Both are also worthwhile to know outside the hobby (unlike mush softcode which has no use outside the mush world).
And the power even a little code-skill opens up to you is tremendous, far out-weighing the effort to learn it. It's what allows you to go beyond anything the engine dev imagined and make your game truly uniquely yours.

I have a lowly 0.657. I for one welcome our new 2+ overlords.
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Griatch

An awesome move, @tehom! I might take a stab at installing this too, to check it out.
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Griatch

@roz said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@griatch said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@fortydeuce said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@griatch said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

nick page foo=$1=page foobartholicus=$1

Thanks! I asked on the info chan about how to get nick to do this, and the impression was that it probably wasn't possible. Much obliged.

No problem. I'm surprised that was the impression.

I'm the guilty party, but I thought @fortydeuce was specifically looking for a name alias situation, wherein he could set an alias just for a person's name and have it work anywhere. Not just paging a specific person. Or I would've started looking at setting up a page alias!

Actually, the nick command does this too. By default nick operates as if you gave the /inputline switch, that is, it will just match things as you write them, from the beginning of the line. But you can also apply nicks to object-lookups your commands do (a Character is just like any Object in Evennia) by using the /object switch:

> nick/object dude = griatch

> look dude
<description of Griatch>

> nick/object bbox = great box of apples
> give bbox = dude
You give Great box of apples to Griatch.

> nick/object t$1 = tall $1
> give bbox = tman
You give Great box of apples to Tall man

Use the /accounts for nicking account references (maybe less often useful).
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Griatch

PS: The issue was closed. Latest Evennia now allows you to include = in the pattern by escaping them with \=.

Edit: Actually page in particular does not use the regular search mechanism, so you cannot nick that one. Gah ...
Edit2: ... and now you can! At least in base Evennia, don't know when Arx updates.

(re-post since the first was lost in the MU Soapbox database crash)

https://itch.io/jam/enterthemud

The Mud Coder's Guild is announcing their first Game Jam with the theme Procedural. It runs between April 15 and May 15 2018, with winners announced in the beginning of June. Runner-ups win books on MMO design while the winner gets an Amazon reading tablet. See the link for more details.

While they use the term "MUD", the rules say

The generally accepted definition of “Multi-User Dungeon” is a text-based multiplayer roleplaying game, but with that said, feel free to stretch that definition to whatever limit you see fit.

So any form of MU* should be okay. You can also use any third-party library, server or toolkit. Maybe try to see what you can put together in a month?

Note: I'm not personally involved in the game jam. I just thought it was a good initiative that should be supported and spread around. Also fun to see what people come up with.

@cobaltasaurus If you don't know the programming language in which it is written, just looking through a foreign code base will indeed be confusing. But as @faraday points out, it's the taking- apart bit that's helpful.

If you worry about getting too much ready but unknown code without learning, I would not use the Arx code straight up. Rather consider this work flow:

• Pull the Arx code down (without installing or starting a game with it) in a separate folder to use as reference. Start a "vanilla" Evennia instance in another, currently without any changes from the default.
• Pick one simple aspect of Arx that you want to have in your game - maybe a single command or small functionality.
• Go dig into Arx for where that is accomplished. If the amount of code feels overwhelming, pick another feature that is more contained. Copy & paste that code into your game (into existing modules or new ones as needed - knowing how modules work is an important aspect of Python).
• Make it run in your vanilla Evennia instance. Don't give up. Just learning how to extract only the bits of Arx you need and adapt it to the 'vanilla' structure you had will teach you a lot. Don't be shy to ask questions.
• Now go into figuring out why that feature works and how. Since it's relatively isolated you will not be as distracted by other things, but it still interacts with the rest of Evennia. So digging into the extensive Evennia docs or into the brains of the community will get you places and hopefully give good insight.
• Now customize the feature a little to your own needs, make sure it works the way you want and expects. If you get overwhelmed, maybe it's better to start with a smaller code feature to explore.
• Rince and repeat, gradually making your game less vanilla.

Python is a very good beginner's language, but it's also very powerful and there are still many concepts to grasp; Like with any language, understanding takes time. If you haven't, peek at our Pyhon intro, which helps you into debugging and testing Python code using Evennia.
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Griatch

Update: For our visually impaired developers I've now made it so each screen shot in the blog post above is a link to a text-only version of that screen. We have the luxury of using a text-based medium after all!
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Griatch

@faraday Actually, I don't under-estimate the power of this - DIKU is by far the most commonly used server of all, probably mainly because it comes with a full game system - vanilla fantasy with classes and everything. It spawned (and keep spawning) games that all feel the same. People patch DIKU with layer upon layer of hackish C code in order to make their games stand out from the baseline DIKU. It doesn't change the fact that the out-of-the-box nature of DIKU has made it a very, very successful engine.

(I'm not trying to compare Ares to Diku per se btw, just noting that I'm aware that providing a playable base game will help adoption). It's quite possible that you are right and that a highly opinionated server is a much faster way towards making people get going with your platform.
I picture Ares and Evennia in many ways cater to different user demographics though. I see Evennia catering to developers first hand. It's their job to in turn cater to players with the games they create. The stuff we add to the core library to help get them going is bonus stuff as far as I'm concerned.
I think (from what I understand) that your primary audience are game runners primarily and developers second. Which are perfectly fine and parallel approaches.
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Griatch

If anyone here's interested, here's the first part of my Dev-blog about creating the Evscaperoom. It might be interesting as a view on the kind of thinking and planning was needed.

https://evennia.blogspot.com/2019/05/creating-evscaperoom-part-1.html

@cobaltasaurus said in Development Thread: Sacred Seed:

Having three very advanced coders come and tell me, effectively, "just try harder" isn't really an encouragement for me. I appreciate the faith in my abilities and the attempts at encouragement-- but I don't learn that way, and I never have.

"Try harder" is not what anyone meant to say, I can practically guarantee that. But fair enough - people learn in different ways!

Just know that you are not alone.

To take the Evennia community, it's not unusual at all for us to get people dropping in with very little or no Python experience (it happens about once a week I think). If you know mushcode and even some Java you are in fact way ahead of the pack! Java is more similar to Python than mushcode is, I would say.

I learn via a combination of interactive instruction and hands on doing. (e.g. listening to someone give instructions, and answer questions as I have them. Or chatting actively while I'm working on code.) . I learned Java in a classroom setting by listening to my instructor discuss various bits of code, while working on the code on my own computer. I learned MUX tinycode by interactively building a +who with @ronan. And then latter by digging through help files on function classes to build +Events.

Breaking down code as people suggested above is a very efficient way but I know I recommended it because it sounded like you wanted to learn Python and worried that using Arx code would bypass that. If breaking down existing code is not your thing, others have gone about it in various ways, for example like doing basic Python/Evennia tutorials or simply by hanging around in the Evennia IRC chat and asking questions, both big and small. Doing that is pretty close to 'interactive instruction' in fact, except it often involves more than one tutor.

I'm very grateful @Tehom put the Arx code out there, and I was very grateful when he sent it to me before hand, so I could look at things. But I've looked at it and it is so far above what little I know of python it's like looking at Kanji when I'm barely able to read Romanji.

Arx is the result of many years of work on Tehom's part. There is a reason it's useful as a base to start from. But I too would need to really sit down to see if I could understand its details - and even then might have to ask him about why things work the way they do. Reading someone else's code is never easy and quadruple so if you are not yet familiar with the language!

It especially doesn't work for me since it's not like softcode, where I can change a tiny line in the code and immediately run it. I have put it onto the server, then reload the game, and then hope I haven't broken anything.

For Evennia you need to get used to working in two windows - one for your code and one for your game. Once you are used to this, you will see small changes pretty much immediately in that system as well. Also remember that you don't need to have any remote server or anything to run Evennia - you can run just just fine in the comfort of your own laptop (with no internet, even) as you experiment and learn.

I can't do what you can do.

I don't beleive that is true about you or anyone.
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Griatch

@Joyeuse said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

What primarily keeps me there, though, is just being able to write. I've been trying to piece together attempts at possibly running PRPs because I want to contribute to worlds that feel like they're sort of persistent and living around whatever I'm doing. Some moreso than others, but with the same conceit, without falling into the "Living Worlds" of communities like Roll20. I enjoy writing multiple descriptions, fluffing out different facets of a character who's playing a minor part in a sprawling tale of a city or an entire galaxy.

This board tends to be very MUSH-centric, but it's a wide MU world out there. It sounds like you might find it interesting to widen your horizon and try out a RP-heavy MUD or two, where the world is literally moving on around you. It's not WoD, but something like The Inquisition: Legacy or similar may be worth to at least check out. Who knows which RP style you end up prefering more in the end.
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Griatch

All in-text commands or links/exits in Evennia can be made clickable when you play in the web browser or in telnet clients supporting the MXP standard. This is not a magic bullet either though - many find reaching for the mouse a distraction and that it ruins the UI experience (such as it is). So some devs are really taking things like that to heart while others find it more of a distraction and don't bothger. The opinions on what is 'newbie-friendly' varies a lot.

That said, Evennia's default command style is just that - a default. It looks a little like MUX-style commands partly to make it feel a little familar but also because the original creator of Evennia came from MUX. But you can change the command syntax to what you like. We have devs who prefer more MUD-reminiscent syntax while others want a more 'natural language' style of commands similar to interactive fiction. So in this regard, Evennia is not helping to 'unify' command styles. It would just not make sense since Evennia can be used for (almost) any text-based game style. Heck, someone's making a rogue-like (top-down scrolling map and all) in Evennia right now!

Commands aside - if you are to roleplay in this style of game you'll need to enter text somehow; but even the very aspect of writing text is a hurdle for the 'mainstream' gamer ... I remember a comment by one of the guys from Iron Realms (the company running some of the few remaining commercial MUDs), noting that they loose most of their new players the moment they leave the graphical chargen and are presented with the text interface for the first time.

I was just made aware of a recently presented MIT article where they use text game worlds created in Evennia.

The article tests AI natural language processing using a "deep-learning" neural network. The goal is, basically, for the system to learn to play the game in as optimal a fashion as possible based only on the text being shown to it. That is, the computer needs to discern the (hidden) game state only based on text output the same way a human must do.

The scientists first build a small test "house" in Evennia, containing four rooms. This is used to train their neural network. The house has rather formulaic descriptions and features a straight-forward "quest" of finding and eating an apple. They then apply this trained network to the actual challenge - playing Evennia's official tutorial world, which comes with Evennia out of the box.

Our tutorial world is basically a small and well-contained solo-quest to show off some of the things possible with the system. The scientists doesn't appear to have modified the actual game play but I can only presume they have tricked out the system with some extra behind-the-scenes stuff to properly monitor and analyze their results.

The paper's authors write that solving the multi-room final quest (finding the tomb of a fallen hero) was too hard a problem and beyond the scope of this article. Instead they focused their performance analysis on a much more mundane task: the AI player managing to cross a bridge.

The swaying bridge in question is actually implemented as a single Evennia room but designed so that it takes multiple actions to cross. Every step, the room description you see changes and there are also random weather messages as well as a small random chance to fall off the bridge (and end up in a different area) if you linger for too long. All you really need to do is to walk east multiple times, but for an AI having no inherent concept of what a "bridge" is, this is clearly a complex task.

The article shows that their proposed algorithm performs better than comparisons (and a lot better than random chance). The AI does figure out how to cross the bridge about 50% if the time, and it tends to score higher than the compared methods when it comes to avoiding invalid commands and similar scoring metrics. While their measure of success is limited to succeeding to cross the bridge, many of their examples are from other rooms which suggests to me that the AI is actually taking on the whole game.

So from the perspective of the scientists, this was successful. It does give some insight into the current state-of-the-art of AI research as well: There is certainly no real competition to human players on the horizon at this point but it's a small step on the way. I hope they continue expanding their work along the same lines. Using text-based games as test beds sounds like a good idea overall and from my own brief contact with the researchers (at at point where they were just thinking about using Evennia), they seem to be quite dedicated to the concept.

At least I found this interesting. I wrote up more details, including links to the original article in the Evennia dev blog here.
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Griatch

Telnet has some issues but I feel some disparage telnet just for the sole reason that it's old.

Fact is telnet, as a protocol, is easy to work with. It's straightforward and simple to debug by just printing what the heck you are receiveing and sending in plain text. And over the years the MU* community has made a series of extensions to expand its capabilities to act as a game protocol, like MCC for compression (less important than it used to be), MXP for client-handled text markup, GMCP/MSDP for server/client out-of-band instructions etc. Flip on SSL and you can even give it some notion of security.

From the server's perspective the main problem is that many of these custom MU* telnet-protocols are only vaguely standardized, and even when there is good documentation (not at all a guarantee), third-party clients are often ignoring that documentation or present lackluster, partial support. And who do users blame if their client suddenly misbehaves with a server because their client is not following specs but the server do? They sure don't blame their (often ancient) client.

The other main drawback of telnet is of course, as mentioned already in this thread, the need for a custom client. This has a generic interface not customized for that a given game. Clients like Mudlet have worked hard to allow games to easily offer game-custom skins and settings though - games like GodWars2 have made quite impressive and easy features available this way - people playing GW2 has a Mudlet client that looks nothing like the vanilla one. Still, there's no denying that third-party clients still present a hurdle for complete newbies.

Web clients have the advantage of being almost completely under your control as a dev (I say almost since the browser affects things too). No need to worry about weird standards or client compliance - when you control both ends of the wire you can make your client work exactly as intended. That players can easily just press a website button and be in-game is a nice bonus. The drawback is that you are then playing catch-up with the features of third-party clients that have been in development for 20+ years in some cases.

There are lots of possibilties though. For example, here's a GIF example of user BattleJenkin's experimental (not yet official) web client for their Evennia game "World of Cool Battles":

This is replacing Evennia's default webclient GUI with a JS GUI library of their preference (it's using HTML5's canvas element). It offloads all location descriptions in its own window and uses light graphics and special effects to enhance gameplay. It's possible one could achieve similar results with Mudlet (maybe in MUSHclient too?) using GMCP/MSDP and a custom skin, but it's a nice indication of the possibilities.

Telnet still has a place I think, for the existing crowd/power users using and expecting the features of their particular third-party client. I believe aiming to offer web clients with features on par or better is the way forward though.
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Griatch

@thenomain said in A new platform?:

@friarzen said in A new platform?:

@thenomain What are these "spawns" you speak of?

Spawned windows. Using pattern matching to push input into a different screen. A lot of people use it for the channels that Faraday is accusing that we just plain put up with, tho a lot of people don't just put up with them if there are options. Atlantis (Mac) has them and Potato (cross-platform) does too.

Here's this thread of...dear god, two years ago.

http://musoapbox.net/topic/852/do-you-use-spawns-and-how

For our webclient, Evennia is doing this on the server-side level in our development branch. The game dev can 'tag' messages coming from the server and the user can then divvy up their UI as they want (splitting and dragging panes around using spiffy JS) and assign one or more of those messages to go to the pane(s) they want.
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Griatch

@faraday said in Choosing a MU Server:

But this speaks to a core philosophical difference between Evennia and Ares. Ares is designed to be a 'MU in a box'. There are a bunch of things you can configure easily, but if you want a radically-different +where display, or to completely remove the BBS system, it's going to take some code surgery. Whereas Evennia is more of a blank slate. If you like Sparks' BBS you just install it. Or you can use some other BBS. Or make your own. In this regard it's more like the old servers. Harder if you just want something that works out of the box, but easier if you want to go off the beaten path or just do something your own way.

This is true. Part of that philosophical difference is that Evennia is not specifically targeting MUSH-style gameplay the way Ares is. It's one of the styles Evennia can support, which is why it defaults to a more blank slate game-content wise. Evennia is (text-)game-style agnostic and could (and is) used as a starting point to make any form of MU*, from MUSH-style to very code-heavy MUDs and even IF or Rogue-like games (!). Ares is more focused, so as @faraday alludes to, if the kind of game Ares offers is your cup of tea you are going to get more stuff out of the box and probably get started faster. With Evennia, more assembly will be needed.
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Griatch

Those prices seem low to me. That said, I don't claim to be able to properly judge the 'market' value for code work when the 'market' is a niche hobby like this. On one hand @Thenomain offers a rare skill (how many in the world knows mushcode+mushes+mush-common-rpgs well enough to offer this menu of services in the first place?), on the other hand is the question as to what people are willing to pay to progress their hobby. This is a very old discussion. There will always be people with more dreams than means. But my impression at least is that most in this hobby appear to be adults that should be both able and willing to pay properly to have a human spend time to customize or even make a game for them. Especially when it's so open for learning to do yourself.

That said, as @Ashen-Shugar also hints at, I'd personally feel pressured if I charged money per Evennia-project/feature/bugfix whatever. It'd take some of the enjoyment out of working on these things, for me -make it feel more like work. After being asked about it from time to time, I solved it by setting up Patreon/paypal with the possibility of donations but with no tiers or recompense: That is, if you want to tip me for my work with Evennia, it's highly appreciated. But I treat it as a donation - you don't have to do it and I promise nothing explicit in return except that I'll keep doing what I've been doing. Does it cover the time I put in, in a 'market' sense? Not by a long shot. Maybe using tiers etc would draw in more money in pure numbers. But the non-specificity of it works fine for me and that freedom is worth a lot in itself.

It also doesn't make sense to have a national vote on a work day like many countries have. Either make election day a holiday or move it to the weekend...

Sweden has a much smaller population of course, but nevertheless people are pretty spread out. It does help that we always vote on a Sunday. You can pre-vote at plenty of local places the two weeks before election day (I never voted on election day in my life). Heck, I recently learned that officials from the voting commission even do the rounds visiting disabled people on election day to give them a chance to vote from their homes/beds etc. Voting is not mandatory here and participation varies, but this year we were still at 87% voting participation, probably partly due to making it as easy to vote as possible.
(Then that the election was so even so as to cause a lot of parliamentary confusion after the election is another matter ...)
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Griatch

@Sparks said in Evennia 0.9 released:

@Griatch said in Evennia 0.9 released:

The player-options have been partially converted to use a generic format with
validation. This is specifically used for styling information, and allow e.g.
a player to specify how EvTables are displayed to them (like changing the
colors and symbols used). (PR by Volund).

Oh thank the lord; this means in my little custom core I've been writing for future projects, I can kill off my @display command; that was meant to let you set all your UI preferences (header/footer colors for all output, EvTable styling, etc.) One less thing in the core, one more thing in the base and globally used... that's a win. Remind me to thank Volund later.

This still needs more docs. But it's there.

(Though the idea of converting all of Arx's codebase from Evennia 0.7/Python 2.7 to Evennia 0.9/Python 3.7 gives me a mild feeling of existential terror.)

Friarzen already made a draft PR for this process for Arx. So hopefully it should not be too horrible.
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Griatch