Posts made by 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).
.
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.

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

@fortydeuce I used nick page foo?$1=page foobartholicus=$1 where the ? translates to any individual character. Which does mean that typing page foobartholicus=hey! resulted in You page foobartholicus with "artholicus=Hey!"

Good point. One should still be able to enforce a = there, so the issue still stands, but this is a nice way around the problem.
.
Griatch

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

@griatch Please drop me a PM when it's fixed, because paging foobartholicuses all over the place is something I mess up about 25% of the time (so lazy, and so my instinct is to shorten the name).

Edit: Caught the fix! A bit easier, but I can't use equals signs with that, which is also instinctive. Still would like to be able to p der=Test and page der=Test, because that's where my instinct goes.

Sure, it should work. As for fixing, when I get around to fixing it in Evennia it does not necessarily mean it'll be fixed in Arx immediately, you'll have to ask the Arx folks for that - Evennia is the underlying Engine Arx runs on, I have nothing directly to do with Arx per se.

Edit: Here is the new Evennia issue if you are interested.
.
Griatch

@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.

ETA: As a test...
nick page der=$1=page derovai=$1
results in
You must use the same $-markers both in the nick and in the replacement.

Heh, you are right. That would be a parsing issue with all those = it would appear. That's something for me to fix on the Evennia side I think. Mapping page der $1 instead will work for now.
.
Griatch

@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. Modifying tell (which is an alias of page) is actually one of the examples in help nick
.
Griatch

@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.
.
Griatch

@magee101 said in A directory of MU*'s that's actually good:

How did a question about finding games turn into codespeak? Games guys, games!

Because the "codespeak" concerns how to make such a list of games available.

As for MSSP, this is of course a very MUD-centric invention so the original specification lists things the listing-websites were interested in listing at the time of its inception. Until there is a central site that looks/lists other tags (or just lists all tags you provide) there is little point in expanding it with custom tags even though that's of course possible (it's a very straight forward telnet extension).
Having the game call the listing site (like Ares/Evennia handles its games) rather than the other way around appears to be a saner way to do it (the issue then rather becomes one of (lack of) ownership of your entry. With the Evennia listing site we have, for example, not introduced any registration concept yet, this is something we'll probably have to look into as the number of entries grows (the listing-site code is of course open-source though, so if anyone wants to make their own, feel free).
.
Griatch

@apos said in A directory of MU*'s that's actually good:

I registered with a bunch of sites, but since the listing never showed up and I never heard anything back, I assumed it didn't work or whatever.

If it doesn't, please make an issue for it, issues will never get fixed if people don't report them.
.
Griatch

Evennia (and, I presume, Ares) use a custom in-built protocol for our game-lists. There is however also an "established" mud standard for this. It's called Mud Server Status Protocol MSSP and works so that the listing website regularly connects (over telnet) to the game and retrieves the data. Evennia does support this but I don't know if any of our devs ever bothered to register with a site that uses it. Not sure if the traditional mush servers have support for MSSP but it's common in traditional MUDs since KaViR's C code snippet supports it.
.
Griatch

@ashen-shugar said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

@sparks said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

You're completely right on the backend side, but I stand by my statement here that most of the front-end UI work needs to be duplicated if you're going to really take advantage of the web. And if the question is why people would want web-only instead of web-and-telnet-both with everything presented in two formats, that duplication of work is the reason I've seen some people balk at that design.

I've been toying with the idea of a form of templating for this.

ergo, a method to have a generic base template code to say 'this is how I want my page to look' and then have the various other languages gobble it up in formatting.

Maybe have it in XML/JSON or something and then allow code to parse it for handling. Could find ways to enbed pre-defined encoding for specific languges as well, so a one template fits all type of environment.

This sounds interesting, but it maybe hard to generalize? There are a slew of templating languages out there though, might be worth looking at over raw xml at least.

The way we on the Evennia side are going about this is to have a generic Python data format internally

("cmdname", (arg,...), {key:value, ...})

For example, a simple send of a description looks like this:

("text", ("A nice place that...",), {})

and the very last protocol layer translate to whichever client type wants the data. Extra info passed with the data are only used by protocols that understand it (so this could also contain instructions pertaining to gui look, window-pane-name etc).
So the protocol layer makes sure the webclient receives a JSON object whereas the telnet client receives a text string or an GMCP/MSDP instruction depending on what it supports. On the web side there is a js lib, in front of which you can put any third party js gui lib you want (our default one mimics a telnet interface).

You could certainly build a single-page js app on top of this that handles bboards, logs etc, but using regular html pages seems more suitable for some of those applications. Since we are built on Django we get the web templating/db-connections for free, but this is then not directly linked to the "traditional" telnet-like output but served by it's own integrated web server. So not quite what you are referring to/suggesting there.
.
Griatch

@alzie

The 'issue with telnet', from the perspective of the server is indeed not the protocol itself but the inconsistency in the interfaces of the clients using it and the lack of standards when it comes to the mud-specific telnet extensions. This is a technical issue and it matters greatly for your development time if you can't be sure just how your fancy new design will show up in different clients.

If you make your own stand-alone telnet (or whatever protocol) client or dictate that your game only works with a single client of a specific version, design and specification, that'll indeed serve the same purpose as supplying a web client (assuming you make it cross-platform). Depending on how complex your designs you'll also need an update-infrastructure or otherwise make sure that your players all update their client down the line as you add new features or gui elements. Mudlet has this for plug-in GUIs as far as i know. Web clients have it natively.
.
Griatch

@surreality

That chaff is demoralizing as hell, and it is not just a case of 'grow a thicker skin'. It is a lot of goddamned work, and it takes real positive energy and the ability to hope that it will make things at least just a little better in order to even attempt one of these things.

I'm not familiar with your project or the talk-downs you faced concerning it (sounds really disheartening). Maybe it could be an idea to collaborate with more people than fewer? From personal experience I can only say that developing code in the open as open-source (such as on Github) and finding people commenting on it or, even better, strangers volunteering to contribute to your code with code of their own is a real morale boost that I hope everyone gets to experience some time.
Unrelated to the current topic of telnet but still something to keep in mind: There are huge resources and free infrastructures to make it fun and motivating for developers of all kinds out there, outside the MU* hobby walls.
.
Griatch

@arkandel said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

@griatch I think the issue here is that some clients handle command lines starting with / as internal commands instead of sending them as-is. Or that's my understanding - nothing done on the server side can fix that.

I didn't interpret that as being the main gist of it, but fair enough. You can indeed not do anything about that on the server side. My post was about the inconsistency in client behavior and why this means telnet is a problem compared to web solutions where you control the client as well as the server. So I guess that still fits.

(An evennia-specific example of this problem is the tintin++ client which will interpret the semi-colon ; as a new client command, not caring that it's also the Python continuation symbol useful when running Python statements in-game. Luckily tintin++ has a verbatim mode to ignore all such special inputs but most new tintin users will trip up on that at least once).
.
Griatch

The discussion of Telnet vs the world is old. From the server-developer's perspective telnet itself is easy to work with. You can even add encryption to make it secure. From the server's perspective the problem is the inconsistencies on the client side. The MUD-extensions to telnet (GMCP/MSSP/MSDP etc) are described in various online documents but there are no "official" standards or agreements apart from what the biggest games/clients once implemented. Going to a web interface when one controls both the server and the client is a very appealing prospect.

(Coincidentally, if anyone's interested in using /me <pose> in an Evennia game, you can enter the following (assuming the game didn't remove Evennia's default nick command):

nick /me $1 = pose $1

Henceforth, /me smiles is the same as doing pose smiles. )

@rnmissionrun said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

Evennia has been around for 11 years. I would hardly call that 'young'.

People have been putzing around with it for 11 years, yet it's still on a 0.7 beta release and the first real games only seem to have hit in 2016. @Griatch can comment on its status further, but as far as I can tell it's very much still in development.

I would personally say that while the Evennia codebase is 11 years now, it was a very different thing initially. In its current recognizable form it has been around for something like 7 years or so. It's certainly possible to make production-ready games with it (as Arx exemplifies) but it's still very much in active development. As for the version number we didn't even have a versioning scheme until two years back or so, so we've been pretty slow with increasing those. I would like to see more advanced web integration before we move up to something like v1.0.

ETA: Ares, incidentally, is also 11 years old. I started fiddling around with it back in 2006. And it's not done either.

I didn't know that. But it does go to show how much work is involved in things like this and how long time it takes when development only happens in one's free time.
.
Griatch

@nyctophiliac said in Questions About Evennia:

Oh please don't misunderstand I never thought you guys were /truly/ tired of answering my questions at all. As a matter of fact, whenever I have posed a question of any sort on the IRC/Discord channel, I've always gotten a response. Incredibly helpful community you have. And I'm glad you haven't tired of me just yet because I have 0 experience in coding and will likely be asking hundreds more. (Ok. Well I do CSS, PHP, Java, HTML but those are hardly relevant at the moment).

At least CSS and HTML are both very relevant if you want to get creative with your web experience!
But yes, don't be shy to ask questions. It's always hard to get into a new library, especially so if the language itself is unfamiliar. It can also be diffucult for us devs that already know the system well to perceive what is confusing, unclear or hard for a newcomer to grasp; so questions help us too in a way.
.
Griatch

As for learning Python, I recently wrote a tutorial for people wanting to get their very first taste of Python through Evennia-examples only. You (should) only need a text editor and Evennia up and running to start. You can find it here: https://github.com/evennia/evennia/wiki/Python-basic-introduction

@RnMissionRun
I don't agree with this notion. Of course you can always make relevant comparisons. For someone like you who used mush and now is learning Evennia, just documenting the pitfalls and things you have to think differently about to progress would be useful to others.
.
Griatch

What would be nice to have would be a "Evennia for MUSH users" actually written by a MUSH user who also knows Evennia to go into the Evennia for <Engine>-users category of our tutorials. I contributed a small article (which first appeared on here) but it is only very broad and I'm not musher to begin with. Alas, no musher has actually stepped up to that challenge (and I've asked about it for years in our forums). It's not just mush-coders for sure; people with experience in other engines seems just as unwilling to write comparisons it seems.
.
Griatch

@thenomain said in Questions About Evennia:

@griatch said in Questions About Evennia:

We are not tired of people asking questions in the Evennia support channel

I can attest to this. The Evennia IRC channel is filled with non-stop helpfulness. Also, puppies and unicorns.

V...V...whatshisname is a PennMush to Evennia coder. He knows extremely well what non-coders are looking at and can help you transition where others on the channel are coders used to talking to other coders. There are others, but he's the one person who comes to mind. Not his name, mind you, but him as a person.

edit: Yes, @Volund. He's one-of-us from the WoD crowd.

There is plenty of people dropping in there that have no previous programming experience at all, whether Python or any other mud-specific language. Those with specific mushcode experience helps with the issues and questions specific to that group though, for sure.

--

As an aside: @griatch, your code example of Why Evennia Is Better Than TinyMU* is kind of ass. Whomever coded the example that you're dissing should be lightly smacked. I can think of a million reasons why you should use a real programming language to code, but "because we have a poor example of Tiny coding" is not one. It reminds me of those PC-vs-Mac OS or Android-vs-Anyone Else wars that some people still think matters.

Not being harsh, but it's a bit disingenuous.

I don't read mushcode myself. The example is written by a mushcode coder that also was one week into learning Python when writing the Evennia comparison. So to me as an experienced Python coder the Evennia example is ugly too honestly. But sure, I hear what you're saying; it's not our intention to make misleading comparisons so if the example comes across as disingenuous we can remove it.
.
Griatch

@skew That would be @Volund I think.