Best posts made by Griatch

Digital Ocean is indeed a good choice. I set up a droplet to run Evennia with my Evsvaperoom game the other day and it was a breeze. I should write a tutorial for it one of those days ...

As for servers, others have said it well already (your choice depends on what you want and your coding chops). I just want to point out that while Evennia is indeed a Mu* creation toolkit of sorts, and the core is deliberately 'bare', there are a lot of contribs to play with and build on these days. So you don't need to do many things fully from scratch unless you really want to. But there is also no denying that if you have no desire for any coding at all, Evennia is not the server/codebase for you.
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Griatch

Good progress with Ares; keep it up, @faraday!

@lithium Just to note, in Evennia (which Arx uses), you can send the idle command as a keepalive.

Edit: I see this answer was already given. Ah well.
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Griatch

@Ifrit This thread have more steered towards Ares implementation and use, but to reply to the original post - a scene-system would work well to implement in Evennia and would of course be useful to have as a contrib. Some, like Pax, already considered/worked on it but I don't think there is a complete system available at this time.

... But even so, Evennia and its contribs tend to be more developer/toolbox-centric. If the goal was more Ares-like plug-and-play one would need to release things as a gamestyle-specific Evennia game-dir (like Arx did for Arxcode, but with a bit more polish for reuse).

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

Please set up a way, if possible, to page shortened names. Sure, that can lead to mispages, but it would be about 1000% (totally real percentage!) easier to me to page foo=Stuff instead of page foobartholicus=stuff

Without modifying anything game-side you should be able to use a nick for this, at least for the people you page a lot:

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

Here $1 (with no following whitespace) means that this is where "the rest" of your input goes (without it the nick would not accept you entering anything more; you could use $2, $3 if you wanted to catch individual words). You could then page them with page foo=<text>.
You could put any abbrevision on the left, so

nick pf $1=page foobartholicus=$1

means that you can do pf <text> to page them. See help nick for more info.
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Griatch

@DnvnQuinn said in Mud Hosting, for 0 budget?:

A while ago, going on a year +, I signed up for Freemudhost, despite numerous attempts to contact, I received no reply. I'm disabled, with 0 available income, so even the 4.50 over at Genesis Mud is too much. Now, I'm not ASKING for a free host. I'm just seeing if there is one available out there aside from Free Mud Host.

Especially during development, using your own computer is probably the cheapest (but also consider your Internet/electricity bills!).

This is some info we put together on our wiki for how to use your own computer as a host and to set up a free domain with FreeDNS. Just ignore the Evennia references and it should be useful for any Mu* server you want to use.
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Griatch

@Wizz

There are several ways to do this in Evennia. Below are two.

The wilderness contrib

A version of 'room-less' already exists for Evennia. You can look at the wilderness Evennia contrib here. It works as a mixture of coordinate- and room-based movement.

The basic premise is that the world is described by a 2D ascii map representing the coordinates. When a Character enters the wilderness they get their own room with a given coordinate stored on it. All exits of the room loops back to the same room. As they move in a direction through the world, the coordinate changes and a new description and set of exits are loaded but you are not actually moving to a new room. When two Characters share coordinate one simply enters the room of the other and when they separate they each get their own room again. Fixed locations in the wilderness are still "normal" rooms set at at given coordinate, into which you enter when you go there.

This particular contrib is intended to allow large world maps without needing to create thousands of almost-empty rooms to fill the countryside. So you don't get line-of-sight, distance-measures and dynamic objects approaching you etc like you get in GodWars2 - that's something that would need to be added. Especially combat I imagine could be be tricky with that system unless you dictate that combat always happens in the same coordinate (room).

The contrib is also probably not scaleable to cater for the entirety of a game, one would probably want to restructure it more efficienty to make it easier to add content etc. But the concept works well.

Completely Room-less

If you want to completely get rid of Rooms across the world (i.e. really replicate GW2), Evennia can handle this without any changes to the core engine - but you need to add a lot of new code. You can then ignore Rooms completely (unless you want to keep them for indoor locations, say).

You need to redefine the concept of location. For example you could have a new typeclassed entity Location that describes a given coordinate in the world. You can use two Evennia Tags on the Characters and on the 'Locations' to define their x,y coordinate (three if you want 3D).

You obviously don't get the help of the default Room-based location/exit mechanics, so you'd need to supply new movement commands to manipulate your coordinate (aka move around).

You next need to figure out how to store the descriptions of each coordinate and how to manipulate it with distance (multiple descriptions for different distance brackets? Some sort of algorithm?).

Finally you need to add an engine that handles relational calculations between objects in the database (see e.g. Nemesis' post above) so you can tell which subset of all "locations" are visible to you from your current spot and should be included in the current description. Things like say/pose etc and how they are affected by distance are additional features to consider on top of that.

It would likely be a really fun project, but you should probably be prepared to spend a lot of time on it.

Oh, and if you don't want to go via itch.io, you can also go directly to http://experimental.evennia.com

If you are interested in the code, it's freely available at https://github.com/Griatch/evscaperoom
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Griatch

@thenomain said in Charging for MU* Code?:

Just for those who are suggesting it: Patreon does not have a "tip jar". I really wish it did. A whole lot of people wish it did.

I use Paypal for those who really want to just do a one-time tip-of-the-jar and, as I mentioned, Patreon for those generous enough to do so regularly. Works fine, but I agree something integrated on Patreon would be neat.

@faraday

“Well this other thing you actually wanted is 5x as complicated so that’s going to cost you more.”

“Wtf man you said $50.”

I can tell this is not unusual outside of software projects either; I've had more complex art/design commissions go down similar routes. With art you usually specify how many 'revisions' your contract allows, just for this reason. Without that, the client would nitpick details forever.
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Griatch

@WTFE

Go there. Count the noun objects. Count the managers, factories, models, etc. Some of that kind of stuff is useful and necessary, but what I see in that API reference is a shopping list of design patterns. Of nouns and only nouns.

Professional developers steeped in (the utterly broken and failed) modern OOP software methodology will not find this a problem.

HOBBYISTS will.

That is a ludicrous number of noun objects there.

Which is not very relevant for Python that has no problem to support functional programming …

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Python certainly has limited functional programming paradigms compared to something like Lisp. It does support many aspects of it though, especially compared to Java which is used in that example. And Evennia is using functional paradigms a lot even though you are certainly right that entities in the database are represented by classes and there are many situations where we use class-based handlers for managing data.
Anyway, if you hate OOP and think "hobbyists" as a whole can't enjoy it, I guess we just have to agree to disagree.

Linux.

That is curious, it's usually a very smooth process on Linux, even for those claiming to blindly follow the quick-start instructions with little understanding. Guess you found some edge case. Sorry about that.

There is a briefer point-by-point summary up top but the main install text is indeed pretty lengthy. It's possible we can cut down on that; the text is explaining how to set up things also for those without any previous Python environment.

Look to Textadept for how to do this right. Textadept is a code editor built on Lua, GTK, etc. Its build process downloads all the stuff it needs and builds a local copy, thus guaranteeing that the correct (compatible) version is installed and ready to rock. (The documentation for building Textadept is atrocious -- it's by no means a perfect package! -- but the bit about bringing in its own prerequisites and building them in a local copy is dead perfect.)

I looked at Textadept, thanks! Textadept is a compiled C program with embedded Lua. It does fetch Lua script libs (it looks like) during the install setup process but you still need to download the actual dependencies (GTK, ncurses, gcc compilers) before you do that. Their documentation is brief and to the point, presuming one knows the GNU compilation process beforehand.
It's a fundamentally different type of program than Evennia (Textadept is a stand-alone binary with no particular wish for you to dive into their code) but I concede that for me, who already had all the dependencies, it's indeed a breeze to compile from source.

Assuming you start with a sane Python dev environment, installing consists of activating a python virtualenv (a standard practice for Python programs), cloning the evennia repo and then running pip install -e evennia.

If it's a "standard practice" WHY THE FUCKING FUCK IS IT NOT AUTOMATED!?

It's a good notion, we could by all means look into offering a build script for setting up the virtualenv for those not keen on organizing their own development environment on a particular OS. Any way to quicken the route for newcomers to check things out is beneficial.

Again you're acting as if your users are professional Python developers. If this is, in fact, your target audience, feel free to ignore my critique. But holy fucking shit, if this is your answer to fucking HOBBYISTS you really, really, really, really, FUCKING REALLY need to take a semester or ten of human/machine interaction courses!

No, your critique is appreciated! Many of our users are indeed professional programmers but that does not mean those are the sole target audience - the MU* world is not big enough for that. We have a slew of people learning Python and even learning programming in general on Evennia. If the install process is perceived as "utterly god-awful" by someone new to it, it's worth looking into (it's the first time I hear that, which is why it's a little surprising to me).

Evennia does not allow unprivileged players access to programming tools out of the box, this is true (see also Evennia for MUSHers for some more elaboration on this). I can see the value of this argument if you want your players to explore coding as part of your game design.

Fuck the game design, the question is how do you get people from being players to being people who build games with your framework?

Presumably by being a good codebase that developers like to use? As I've said before, I can see the advantage of softcode in the sense of fostering immediate experimentation directly in-game. The validity of the argument comes down to how many players actually make use of this functionality for more than copy&pasting a snippet or making very primitive improvement-of-life things. Such uses Evennia supports too, and without resorting to full softcode.

I have no doubt that softcode will remain strong for a long time to come. And if building an entire complex game system (not just simple things) line-by-line over a telnet bridge is a requirement for your enjoyment and learning, Evennia will likely never fill your need.

I'm pretty sure every one of the semi-legendary MUSHcode softcoders out there started off just playing around with softcode on MUSHes, making dumb little functions and commands like my random ANSI example above. This is stuff that has no material impact on the game, but is a) fun to do, b) engages users as they find ways to write things that are convenient for them in your game, and c) acts as a gateway to more serious development.

I have no doubt this is one avenue into programming. Conversely you can of course argue that DIKU is the more popular codebase out there by far (definitely in the amount of games it has spawned). And that is despite it having no concept of softcode and requires the budding game creator to learn and code in (archaic) C outside the game.

I'm not sure it's all that relevant for you downloading Evennia though? After all, you have all the exploratory tools available at your fingertips.

I'm looking at a far wider picture than you're looking at. You persist in looking at "only professional Python developers" in effect. I'm looking at "how do you make people who aren't professional Python developers interested in using your product?"

(Hint: if it's "read this document and follow the 18,000 lines of instructions in it to run your very own server, that's a non-starter.)

The beginner's perspective is always useful, it's indeed hard to know what is difficult or not with something you are inherently familiar with. It is the first time I hear that much vitriol against the install process so it's worth to consider. Evennia seems to be considered to be a pretty easy system to use by most beginners, but maybe there is a selection effect with critical voices failing at the install process and not telling us, I don't know.
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Griatch

@faraday said in Coordinates-based Grid:

@griatch I assume for completely room-less you'd also need to write custom code for say/pose/emit/etc., since game communication is normally centered around what room you're in. And any object-interaction commands like 'take/give' (if Evennia has those), describe, look, teleport, etc. Sure with enough work it could be done, but the effort involved strikes me as massive.

You'd actually only need to override the default search() method on the Character - it is used by (almost) all default commands and is the only component that usually cares about location (by limiting the search to things in the same room). If you change that to be coordinate-aware and return a list of matches 'within reach' (however you define that) most of the default commands should 'just work'. In the same way you could override what is reported as the Character's location. No doubt there will be unexpected edge-cases here and there that I could not predict but you might not need to rewrite everything in-depth.

Things like line-of-sight, sound travelling and descriptions changing at-a-distance are completely new concepts though that would require rework of the relevant commands. And many build commands would of course also work differently, and require different options (as for any heavily customized game style).

Not relevant to OP, but FYI for anyone referencing this thread later - Ares doesn't have a wilderness contrib, but if you were going to attempt such a thing I would suggest doing it in exactly the same way that @Griatch described.

The eternally-looping wilderness-room is a nifty concept, yes. I don't know how common it is out there but people have also used the idea for things like ship-faring (the water kind) in Evennia.
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Griatch
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As a minor update; the Evscaperoom engine is now distributed together with Evennia as an optional contrib if you want to make your own multiplayer escape-room.

It is also playable in its full form on the Evennia demo server (which you can find from http://Evennia.com).

This is an interesting thread. I'm personally of the opinion that there's a huge potential user-base out there that would be interested in some variation of shared text- based multiplayer world for their RP needs. There is also a community of visually- impaired players out there that are specifically interested in those games.

A powerful (and accessible) web presence/client is likely the minimum requirement, but things like marketing would also be important - which brings up the general lack of money in this hobby as a limiter, of course.

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

@gryphter I've been trying to poke at Evennia, but as soon as it asks me to do something with windows command lines I burst into uncontrollable tears, so.

This is an interesting point of view. Using the command line is generally an important skill to have when doing anything programming- related though.
... That said, the Windows default command line is admittedly awful. If you are on Windows10, it's really better to use the Linux subsystem for Windows, which supposedly has a sane terminal and gives you access to Linux functionality and convenience.

Anyway, if you need help to get started, drop into the Evennia dev chat on IRC or Discord, we are happy to talk you through getting set up and beyond.
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Griatch

@Thenomain said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

I still don't know Django. Installing Evennia, more than just getting the raw code on my computer, is still daunting as hell. I strongly support @faraday's notion that it's a rough toolkit, maybe a framework, and little else.

We often refer to it as a framework too, although Evennia is pretty fleshed out for a framework, with a lot of resources and a full server+webclient+website out of the box. Could you elaborate more on what you feel is "daunting as hell"? Are you referring to how to start doing stuff in general or how to install with this particular statement?

Compare to, e.g., the Mushlikes, where once installed you can log in, and roll up your sleeves and get immediately to work. Look at nearly every web-based service that you can try for free, too. Sure, none of these may do much, but you can monkey around and build monstrosities on your way to build more complex monstrosities.

This concept of "being able to just jump in" appears to be a common notion here. For a person who wants to create a text-mmo but is not knowing any programming (or those that do but never saw mushcode before), is a mush server really that much easier as a starting point? Learning a new system is never easy. In Evennia's case you need to read documentation and if you are wise you ask questions in our community. In Mush world you likewise need to read docs and talk to people in the community for help. For a beginner there is still a language to learn and idiosyncrasies to get used to, either way.

They also try to keep the metaphors simple. Here are CONTACTS. You can MESSAGE one. You can MESSAGE many; we call this a CHAT. Here's a PLAYER, here's a ROOM, here's a THING, these are all OBJECTS. You link rooms using EXITS. Before you know it, you have learned some basic hierarchical object-lists.

I don't really know if this is a general observation or something I should reply to. All those concepts are almost verbatim present in Evennia at any rate.

The Mudlike mentality went the other way. "Oh, you know C and C++, just mess around with the server until it does what you want." Evennia is very much like this.

I don't see a difference between your two examples. One says "mess around in mush code" , the other says "mess around in these other languages". If you previously know one and not the other, obviously that one will be easier. Plus hardcode allows you to use a real text editor rather than being locked to the telnet command line (depending on your bias that last sentence could be written as "hardcode forces you to use a text editor instead of being able to modify the code in-game", I guess.).

"You don't need to know Django, but run it and do this and this to set it up."
Okay, what do I do once it's set up? "The same thing but don't install it." Um, what?

I'm not sure exactly what you referring to here; A wild guess is the use of the virtualenv (correct me if that's not it). Brief tutorial-mode voice: You start a "virtualenv" when you install. This is a virtual python environment containing all dependencies of Evennia in a separate folder. This allows you to install everything Evennia needs also on a remote computer/server without root access. It also makes it easy to update requirements without affecting the version of the same libraries installed globally on your system (those are often older). This means that when you start Evennia in the future you must make sure this virtualenv is active first, but you obviously don't need to reinstall everything anew every time - that may be the source of the "same thing but don't install it"-comment.

What I'm getting at here is Evennia has no middle ground. There's no playground for it, no toys, and while it's easier to follow than Mush server code it's still not terribly, oh, what I'd call simple. It's an end-point, by design.

It's not simple, no. Evennia's a full-fledged development "framework", to borrow your term from above. Making a multiplayer online game will never be truly "simple" I think. We do offer contribs with pre-made code to build from. This library is slowly growing but could certainly be more comprehensive.

I disagree with Evennia having no toys though. It's all toys. Toys you put together with great freedom to create your own game. Python is very good for creating cool stuff with little code. But yes, if Python is completely new to you, you will likely start by following tutorials and copying examples or code snippets handed to you by the old-timers. I can't imagine this being any different from how most learn in a mush environment either.

What I'm also getting at here is that Mushlikes have no higher ground. They're getting there; Muck started it, Penn dabbled, Rhost is making a stronger push, but building a web-side interface is... okay, Muck has been able to do that for a decade, but I'm not learning Fortran.

As someone using Fortran professionally on a daily basis, I would agree that noone should have to use it for recreational coding ...
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Griatch

I keep missing to notice these questions until someone else has already helped out. Good it was resolved, @Cobaltasaurus.
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Griatch

@HelloProject said:

The idea that people need to pay their dues or whatever and learn to code just so they can create a MU is a ridiculous barrier to entry, and a part of why our community isn't as large as other RPing communities. Creating a simple package and throwing it out there to be used doesn't hurt anyone, so I'll make it my own pet project.

Do consider dropping into the #evennia development IRC channel on Freenode. Would like to hear more what you had in mind. Maybe we can help each other out!
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Griatch

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

This raises some interesting points. Are there ways to set up a world so that the players can impact and change it without GM intervention?

This game style is commonly referred to as a MUD
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Griatch

@Thenomain said in [What is out there?

You seem to be taking it as an attack on Evennia, @Griach, at the very least defending the differences between Mushlikes and Evennia, differences that do not need defended. Explained, maybe, but you've explained them already.

I don't see any of this as an attack or I would have stopped posting here a long time ago. I'm genuinely interested in rational feedback and opinions from you folk coming from a very different end of the mu* experience spectrum than most mud/mushers using Evennia. Do I have to agree or care enough about the feedback to make changes? No, of course not (but I'm not alone developing Evennia either btw, We do accept PRs...). Mush is only one subset of the game types people use Evennia for. Doesn't make it any less valuable to hear it though.

If other people don't think those differences are valuable, why do you care? If you do care, why don't you change them?

Of course I care. I'm a "hobbyist" too you know. I like it when people use my stuff. That doesn't mean I have to agree to please everyone or neglect to try to correct things I perceive as misunderstanding's though.

Edit: I agree this is off topic from the original question though, Apologies for my part in that.
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Griatch

@tehom said in I made a Python-with-Evennia tutorial (looking for feedback):

@cobaltasaurus said in I made a Python-with-Evennia tutorial (looking for feedback):

I, um, have a dumb question but so far I can't find it in the documents. How do I get information about an object-- for example location?

The @ex command is a staff command for returning a display with information on an object. You can also examine individual values in its attributehandler with @ex <object>/<attribute>.

For a lot of things I tend to rely on using @py, which is a powerful command used for executing arbitrary python code. Like I'll frequently do something like: @py x=self.search("whatever");x.do_some_other_call();self.msg(str(x.do_something(some_parameter))) to see the return value of calling a method on some object.

@Cobaltasaurus Also, for completeness, note that you can skip the initial @ for all commands if you want (so examine, py rather than @examine, @py etc) or use some other prefix you prefer like +, / or & (this is configurable in settings).
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Griatch

RPI's and perhaps Evennia I've noticed, seem to be in constant risk of slipping further and further down the corruption hole.

Not sure how Evennia suddenly got clumped into a discussion on ethics and staff corruption. One of the mentioned things above is a specific style of text-based game, the other is a computer program, not even targeted specifically at making RPIs?
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Griatch

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

3. Build web interfaces supported by code: By this I dont mean a web interface that connects people to the command line environment. Build web interfaces that never get to CLI. If you want the player base to evolve, then the hobby itself needs to evolve. Evennia and python are a good start, but ultimately the command line environment and clunky unix format needs to evolve. Move away from "commands" and do things like create an API interface that will take the arguments from the commands in easier web-based interfaces. THE CLOSEST YOU CAN GET TO A WEB PAGE THAT IS 90% TYPING AND SOME LOGGING, THE BETTER. To evolve, there are simply a number of things that need to be automated, and the things I've seen are a good start, but the constant return back to the command line (even if there is a web interface to connect to it) is rough. Mush clients. Etc. They're godsends compared to telnet back in the day for us, but not attractive compared to other formats out there.

You have some very good points in your post; let me single out this one, since it's the one that most closely relates to things I can affect.

The combination of "moving away from commands" and "A web page that is 90% typing and some logging", makes me guess that you are referring to some sort of natural-language input syntax. I can certainly see that for some things, like emotes.

Ditching Commands altogether is not a self-goal in my opinion however. Commands remain in use (also outside of MU*) because they are highly efficient ways to tell the computer (game) what to do. Some things can be offloaded to buttons in a GUI, and that could get you some part of the way, but only for very simple inputs without arguments. Trying to replicate complex command functionality with a GUI will quickly build up complexity in that domain instead.

I would say that an input line that offers command suggestions as you start typing, including which arguments applies in the location as well as with a simple way to pop up a help tip, would go a long way towards discovery for a new player. A webclient could certainly offer that. In the same way, one can and should other conveniences from the chat-program world. Like seeing "..." when a player in the same room is typing, for example.

(More contributors are welcome ... alas I'm not personally as much of a web-dev as I am a server developer.)
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Griatch