Best posts made by ixokai

@autumn I find your argument compelling, tbh. I'd vote yes on the app based on that reasoning.

@Thenomain said in Information Storage Question:

@Ashen-Shugar

I don't know why anyone would suggest not using 64k buffers. I can't code without at least 16 anymore, or at least SQL which is preferable but not universal.

I'm seriously curious what the heck you're doing in MUSH that a 32k lbuf isn't considered overkill.

@three-eyed-crow said in Dreamwalk MUSH:

@ixokai
Indeed, I mistyped. The post shall be left for posterity, though.

Okay Sorry to be a dick on this point. I've just seen some commentary in the past equating FS3 and Ares, saying there was like no reason to use Ares except for FS3, etc, which I think does faraday's work an injustice.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming!

@bobotron said in X-Men Utopia MUX:

@collective
I think FASERIP got mentioned and there was more push for MHRPG (the Cortex one), which has a similar modeling ability as well.

I'm curious how superheros get quantified into stats. They're so... wildcard, they can do anything. I've seen some systems (Champions?) that try to quantify any sort of power into a point thing and while those are cool, even it fell short on the one game I used it on.

I'm not suggesting it can't be done, but I'm not quite sure how to go about it.

On m1963, for example, my OC mutant is a gravity manipulator. His power, essentially, is to touch something and determine a) what is 'down', and b) how strong (or weak) 'down' is.

With this he can do some crazy things. Run on walls, throw cars at people, fly, lift things that are way heavier then he should be able to lift ('down' is 'up' at 10% of 1G, for example).

I can't quite imagine how to frame that on a game with stats.

@wizz said in Coordinates-based Grid:

Can anyone maybe tell me if it's realistic to code it in Python

I can answer this with a definitive yes.

@tnp said in Dreamwalk MUSH:

Sounds interesting. One thing though leapt out at me...

and how many words you wrote.

I don't like the idea of encouraging nonsensical purple prose that takes a half hour to write and even longer to interpret. It actively punishes those who pose concisely.

If someone goes all purple, there's an easy solution. I just won't play with them. So far no one's been stupid. Poses are of what I expect generally in the normal length/quality of modern mushing.

@the-tree-of-woe said in X-Men Utopia MUX:

I feel like having pertinent character details up on a wiki (along with links to more in-depth backgrounds) and a character sheet is a superior choice to a written app. The 'application' should be a player talking to staff about the character and what they want to do with them and then getting the nod. Staff working with an OC to work out their background and build their sheet is essentially the same as reviewing an app anyway.

I'm confused. How is that not a written app? Someone had to write what the powers and limits are on the wiki. I have a huge aversion to anything that feels like an "interview" or "audition", and I don't per se know at app time what I wanna do with a character. Sometimes that depends on dynamics of the team/people.

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

The purist in me balks at describing print as a function; its a statement in Python 2 without a future import. That you can call a statement with parens around its arguments is just an accident of the fact you can put parens about nearly anything in Python. Its a function of parens are grouping syntax, and they don't make tuples-- commas do.

Thanks for the feedback! This exception to print is mentioned in the immediately following paragraph but yes, calling it a 'function' is indeed technically incorrect. I didn't think this was something a complete newbie would gain much from learning out the door. I felt it better to learn calling print as a (sort-of) function from the get-go so that the concept of a function was introduced early and can be referenced later in the tutorial when a real function is created.

Honestly, I wonder if the first thing you'd teach is me.msg -- and only teach print in an advanced mode about debugging. Because what is the classical 'first thing' anyone learns in a programming language? How to print out a statement and see the result. In Evennia, that's not print, that's me.msg.

me.msg("Hello world!") is really Evennia's version of the first programming exercise for every language ever.

@sunnyj said in Dreamwalk MUSH:

@ixokai so, bad?

Huh? I don't understand the question. I've had reservations but not been quiet about them, but none of them have amounted to 'bad'. Changes made have reduced them significantly.

@golgoth said in Dreamwalk MUSH:

I was under the impression that the IC shared connection channel could be used as this central hub. What more would be needed?

Going from "we talked in the IC dreamscape" to "forging a sympathetic connection to" is something currently up in the air as there's differences of opinions on what "sympathy" means. The headwiz @Demiurge thinks random and strangers in fictional usages of sympathy connecting makes sense; I think sympathy is about likeness or intimacy or symbolic closeness. This isn't a mechanics issue, its, "what feels IC and right and makes sense when I enter a scene" and I can just accept Demiurge's words but it leaves me feeling weird. It's not a deal breaker. I just feel weird. I might be weird. This might all be in my head.

@wizz said in Dreamwalk MUSH:

@golgoth said in Dreamwalk MUSH:

I was under the impression that the IC shared connection channel could be used as this central hub. What more would be needed?

Well, it's a public channel, for one thing, and it can get very spammy with just three or four people. And as it works right now, it's anonymous - player names are removed. It's a bigger adjustment than I was expecting, it's not like you can just waltz on down to the local coffee shop and RP with whoever is there and what I'm trying to say is that that is something a lot of players are probably used to taking for granted.

I've quite enjoyed this channel myself, I just wish.. MORE could be made out of it. Like if it could fork off into some private conversations where I'd feel more IC appropriate to share names and details and later create sympathetic links.

Here's what I'm getting at above else: I WANT BAR RP.

I think its the fatal flaw of this game, and I really like this game and really want it to work, but think there needs to be some way for two random people to just at any hour of the day or any level of poverty they're in, just hey, talk.

This will lead them to making connections where they can visit eachothers worlds.

I feel weird being all I WANT BAR RP since the standard mush POV is bah bar rp is boring. The truth is, the staple of just having casual rp in some fashion is what keeps our games running.

My dire frustration is every time I bring this up the headwiz says it will destroy the whole theme of the game about connecting people and traversing dreamscapes, which I don't agree with at all. BarRP is a staple but it is also BORING after like doing it a more then a little with someone. You'll want to go visit their dreamworld or invite them back to your dreamworld real quick, and there, we have connections and traversal.

But we gotta have some sorta talk. The Communal Unconscious almost brings it but it gets a little overwhelming if more then three people are in it at once, and there's no way to narrow its focus to just one or two people who have captured your interest.

@golgoth said in Dreamwalk MUSH:

It could also be an actual player's dream to BE that central hub and then to build it more and more as players come together to think of that dream AS the central hub.
I might pitch that idea to the players in the game tonight when I get home.

Just be aware that @ixokai and I talked about this idea with @Demiurge for quite a while already and he is pretty strongly opposed to there being some sort of easy way to set up or access any kind of central location like that. Like, pretty vehemently.

And man you only saw day 2. He and I talked about it for hours on day one without anyone else there.

On the other hand, I guess that's one approach we didn't take, and there's nothing really stopping you from creating a dreamer character who's a bartender or whatever and trying to get everybody to link up to your dream tavern, for example.

Note this is actively happening; a character making a hub all on their own. That's IC in game. This isn't about there's no way to make something work within the system, to me?

The entire issue is:

If I gotta establish a sympathetic connection with a random stranger, paying a permanent fee of a valuable resource, I... won't do it.

Is this just me being weird? It might be. If I can't get an introduction to Bob over there I'm just not gonna permanently pay to talk to Bob. I won't. If I can't have even ONE SCENE, just one, or some other mechanism to just figure out if we click in RP at all? I'm NOT going to buy that bridge.

That may all be me. I'll never be that guy who pays a limited (albeit free flowing: Really lucidity comes in as a flood with rp) resource on a complete stranger. I like to think I'm a healthy member of this hobby but I'm not THAT healthy.

@the-tree-of-woe said in X-Men Utopia MUX:

@ixokai It's not without its bugs. I'm mostly mulling ways you could get away from the traditional model of app-writing. It's ancient, and while it's still serviceable I can't help but feel like there's got to be a better way to handle it.

I don't know.

I think app writing is fine: what I'm hearing is I think some games are completely idiotic in what they expect out of an app.

One of my characters has, among his various abilities, TK. It is defined thusly:

Telekinesis: Without using a spell, he can lift and manipulate up to two tons of matter with a fine degree of control. This can be used for flight as well: in fact he has a hard time turning it off in that case. He tends to float without really thinking about it.

Mine actually doesn't work on MUX (the Rhost version heavily uses @include), though I'm going to make it work for HorrorMU soon. When I do I'll post an update to my logger thread and ping you to see if you haven't found something you like yet.

@magee101 said in Blood of Dragons:

@balerion Now do you reccommend a "roster" (that seems to be the general term around here for a already CGed character) character because then their skills and stuff are in proper place for the type of character? TBH I love being in dragons and magic and medieval worlds but I am not super huge into the politics and court, I would much rather just male a character that lives as part of court but has no majestic goals of obtaining a higher rank or the throne.

I don't speak for Balerion or this game at all, but --

It's worth nothing there's (virtually) no magic or dragons in this world. The dragons are extinct as of uhh, a decade or two ago I think?, (almost) no one believes in anything magical. The Westerosi empire was built on the back of dragons but that's an era of memory.

Most of ASOIAF is all about human politics.

@zombiegenesis said in X-Men Utopia MUX:

If we could get everyone to write traits that succinct I'd be much less against trait apps. I've run games where I've been very explicit that BGs should be no more than 1 page length and I still got no end of ridiculous BGs. The issue is, that I've found, is that a lot of these appers have apps from ages ago that they just recycle.

To me the same can be said using FASERIP with this: Telekinesis RM

You can see that and a bunch of other traits with a simple +sheet command.

To be clear, I don't think either is wrong necessarily. Just different.

Oh yeah, I'm not against RPGs-or-stats.

In fact I usually prefer them: I like rolling, I like dice informed by stats (better even if situational modifiers can be taken into account) determining success.

Sorry, I was sorta derailing the thread.

More years ago then I can properly count (but something very close to 15-20, exact timing I'm lacking), I was on a game called Armageddon. The game was about Angels, Demons, and humans: about the Blessed, the Damned, the Chosen. This game started out on another actual server, but got migrated to its own existence at some point before I became involved with it.

I was a child and deeply invested in this game. Someone on this game loved me (he thought I was a girl at first, later didn't care when I wasn't, the drama here is everything you can imagine for a game where I'm like maybe 16 at the oldest at this point).

I've always been something of a nerd. Somehow, I became site-admin for this game. I upgraded it to a new version. It was, originally, a game firmly set in TinyMUSH 2.2.

Why? Because shiny.

(What is shiny? I want to swear its TinyMUSH3 but I can't remember for sure so make no accusations. It was an upgrade from TinyMUSH 2.2 for sure) Anyways.

The corruption started.

Exits sent you places exits were not set to. You examine an object and see things on it that should not be there. The game was before my eyes dissolving.

I logged onto some game, I don't even remember which-- but it was something like MUS*H, MPUG, or similar developer centered game-- and asked for help on a channel.

Ashen-shugar answered: Rhost could load this database and fix its problems. While any errors that existed would still exist, it wouldn't get worse.

This seemed like a godsend, as weirdness was increasing almost with every minute.

I set up Rhost.

I had some questions, and Ashen answered them.

I loaded Armageddon's database, and made the major announcement of the transition, and...

Armageddon was fine.

It ran at least-- at //least//-- two years after the conversion where it was boiling itself alive in corruption in its original server.

Man, the faith.

I can not tell you how firm the faith has been since then. I think Rhost, I think two things-- and one is directly from that point of my life that decade and a half ago-- one? I can trust it.

Two? This I got as I became a more sophisticated coder. Rhost is a toolbox that gives me, the coder, all the toys I could ever need.

I decided a couple years ago I only "code" for Rhost games, because things like... say... its printf function (not to be confused with C's printf, but similar in intent) are revolutionary in what I can achieve vs what I want to happen. To say that's the only point is minor: SO many distinct features Rhost allows are exceptional from a coder's POV.

As it turns out, my dedication isn't perfect and I've recently agreed to code for a pair of PennMUSH games because... reasons. (Faraday's +combat is really, seriously, honestly, a better approach to mass combat then anyone's ever done before in the genre)

But still, on my own project, Rhost is the only answer for me. Rhost is reliable. Fast. Capable. But Reliable. I'll never forget that first interaction with Armageddon. A game I loved was dying, literally, and lasted for years after the conversion.

I trust Rhost.

IMHO.

@tragedyjones said in Deep Shadows - Shadowrun 5th Edition MUSH - Help Wanted:

@golgoth

Players are already expected to buy and/or download the book. Downloading chummer isn't the biggest hurdle, and it would make CG easier than self-coding it...right?

Doesn't this make a game 'for players who use windows only' then?

@gamerngeek said in X-Men Utopia MUX:

@the-tree-of-woe said in X-Men Utopia MUX:

@ixokai It's not without its bugs. I'm mostly mulling ways you could get away from the traditional model of app-writing. It's ancient, and while it's still serviceable I can't help but feel like there's got to be a better way to handle it.

Honestly, there is. Just that most of the dinosaurs would never consider it. The answer is: get rid of applications. Your application becomes a link to a wiki with data about your character, like Comicvine or Wikipedia. You can write up a "Differences" paragraph, and go "My character is this, but X". Let's face it...we all KNOW these characters. Everyone on the planet knows Batman. And if someone is apping for Cannonball, odds are good that, yeah, they know Cannonball. What good does it do ANYONE to make people retype and regurgitate info we already know and which is easily available online. None. It's like the long apps of old. In a day when Wikipedia didn't exist, they maybe made some sense. Now? None.

ComicVine and wikia don't work really because characters have vastly different powers often depending on where they are in their story.

Not every character apps in at the top-tier of where they 'currently' are in their story.

Writing a 'Differences:' between if someone was playing a year-1-ish character would be essentially writing a whole app.

And ComicVine has history, but is terrible on details of abilities and skills and the like.

@Ganymede said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:

@ixokai said in Is there a basics of CG out there somewhere?:

I think the order you do things doesn't really matter, because IMHO chargen is mandatory and until its active a game shouldn't be open to players. Hand-statting sucks-- it requires the users to literally know everything possible and requires them to do no errors and staff to catch the inevitable errors and not make mistakes when setting up the stats. I hate hand statting.

Players like to have control over setting their stats.

What many players may not remember is that there were once games where there was no chargen. What you did was apply for a character, which meant sending @mail to staff about what stats you wanted. Staff would then review the application, and stat the PC for you.

Sorry no. I full well the day when some games had no chargen, and I full well remember the endless problems hand-statting led to, from player mistakes to staff mistakes to staff failing to catch the mistakes and trying to clean them up later.

I'm not new to this.

Frankly, if staff had to hand-stat everyone, we'd probably avoid a lot of problems, and the frustration of players not knowing how to use the CGen commands. And because most games require a review process anyhow, I don't think it would slow things down substantially.

I don't know if this is rosy nostalgia or just that your experience was on simpler systems, but I think this wrong: I think there are notably less problems with chargen and notably less frustration with players (especially players who are not experts on the system).

My days on Buffy games before I wrote the chargen for Mystick Krewe... Hand-statting was a nightmare of frustration and complexity and mostly for the player. Just as ONE example.

@wizz said in Deep Shadows - Shadowrun 5th Edition MUSH - Help Wanted:

@ixokai said in Deep Shadows - Shadowrun 5th Edition MUSH - Help Wanted:

@tragedyjones said in Deep Shadows - Shadowrun 5th Edition MUSH - Help Wanted:

@golgoth

Players are already expected to buy and/or download the book. Downloading chummer isn't the biggest hurdle, and it would make CG easier than self-coding it...right?

Doesn't this make a game 'for players who use windows only' then?

Uhh, what? I was pointing out they were talking about incorporating a windows-only app into the process of chargen and there are people who aren't on windows.

Nothing little finger smoking sinister.

@gamerngeek said in X-Men Utopia MUX:

@ixokai Not really. If I wanted to play a Year One Batman, I link to a good Batman wiki writeup (there are lots), and type &differences me=As per link, but cutoff at Year 1. Also, his Robin is Jason Todd, not Dick Grayson.

Done. Finis. Asking for any more is really redundant busywork. Asking people to write up skills and powers is just that. We all know what skills Batman has. We all know what skills Peter Parker has. We know what powers Superman has. And if we didn't, somehow, we click the wiki link and read, same as we would +sheet, except without all the rigamarole.

I look at Marvel wikia pages constantly, due to handling apps. And they are simply not written in a way that clearly shows what powers someone has at a certain point of their development.

I made a logger system (entirely from scratch; someone sent me half the code which inspired the ultimate design, and I don't know who made that originally, but this didn't use any of their code) for Marvel: 1963.

You basically @create an object, drop it, +log/make thing and its now a logger. When in the room the logger has a shortdesc that says if its on or off (and if on its bright about it).

You +log/capture thing, and it grabs everyone currently in the scene, the IC date, the location, the location's desc, and stores it all (there's commands to set these all individually)

When the scene is done, you +log/wiki thing, and it outputs the entire log properly formatted for copy-pasting into the wiki logs section. (You can also +log/show thing=5 to get the last few poses if you have an issue). Mess up a pose? +log/undo thing, and repose. No editing of logs required. Well, almost none. It typically takes me a good 30 seconds to post a complete log after a scene, with most of that made up of trying to think up a title.

I decided I preferred object-based manually-started logs over a system that logs to rooms automatically (even with a +poseclear or auto-emptying system) so its opt-in from a privacy perspective.

This is for Penn but it should be compatible with anything else, but it would require some tweaks to the room parent (basically, change get(%i0/shortdesc) to objeval(%i0,u(%i0/shortdesc)) so they can evaluate safely).

Separately, I have a +po (pose order) thing which does automatically track poses in locations (and clears when empty) without actually tracking content. I could have built pose-ordering into the logger, but since I already completely replaced say/pose/@emit to per-user colorize quoted speech, using that as the basis of storing pose order seemed easiest. Plus it lets you track poses even in private scenes.

(Neither +po nor replacing say/pose/@emit was my idea, I stole it from the 100. I just implemented it differently)

Anyhoo I can probably pull either of these systems together if someone wants them. The +po/etc system definitely requires Penn, but I have an implementation for Rhost. It totally won't work for MUX, though.