Posts made by ixokai

As someone with the memory of a gecko, I can't code without @scan.

I'm just saying.

@Coin said in [Where do you draw the line in having your character take what would otherwise be an "IC" action for them?]

I feel like you're missing the part where I said, " under any criteria ever posited by any roleplayer (or critic of television or literature)," which is the crux of my position.

I might be.

Because I have no idea what the loving hells that is supposed to mean.

I don't mean this to be antagonistic. Your "position" is not clear at all to me. Granted, I'm up at stupid AM so clarity of thought is not my strong point at the moment.

Save the code to a .txt file, and do Logging->Upload File

@Coin said in Where do you draw the line in having your character take what would otherwise be an "IC" action for them?:

Too many long-winded replies to read.

My answer is pretty straightforward: whatever I, the player, decide the character is going to do, is what is IC for the character.

Source: MY REAL LIFE FUCKING EXPERIENCE.

I am a fully fleshed out real life person who makes real life decisions on a daily basis and those decisions do not, under any criteria ever posited by any roleplayer (or critic of television or literature), follow any sort of consistency.

While what @Coin said is true on one level-- ultimately you the writer is responsible for what the character does and whatever you decide is right-- I think it dismisses character-building that goes on in my head, at least.

My characters aren't perfectly consistent, but they have habits, they have different personalities and drives, and aren't just arbitrary. And I, as a fully fleshed out real life person, am fairly consistent. I try to approach that level of consistency with my characters, too.

I try to be true to my character and what I call "the Voice I hear in my head" when a character reaches a certain level of depth. That said, previous comment indicated this is never an excuse, and when it comes to having a fun environment I'll adjust it within reason. (If I adjust too much I might lose the Voice and maybe that is just a character that isn't fun in the current environment/play-group to play-- so maybe I should consider dropping it)

@Rusalka said in [Where do you draw the line in having your character take what would otherwise be an "IC" action for them?]

And yes, I do consider scene stealing and derailing to be potentially damaging to other people's fun. I've seen it ruin scenes and plots ("I solve the whole thing immediately, by myself!"), and the people involved in the worst cases didn't seem to care because "it's what my character would have done lol." (I have several "wonderful" stories of what not to do, in fact, but those are probably better suited for the Hog Pit.)

On the 'I solve the whole thing immediately front', I agree and disagree, and as we just had a big whole Lets Talk About Plots on M1963 tonight, and we talked about just this thing, I have various thoughts.

First, those people with an urge to solve everything in everything they do -- they are robbing everyone else of fun. This is bad.
Second, however, is that sometimes a player might come up with a clever approach using their niche powers that really do solve a scene all by themselves. This is good. To not let them shine in this way, to not reward their cleverness and specialty, is to put plots on a rail and that is bad.
Third, if someone tries to solve everything there is very often a likely consequence you can or maybe should apply. Rarely, I think, is a scene constructed where someone can really win it individually without going all out on such a way there might not be collateral damage at worst or unnamed consequences at best. These should be applied by the GM carefully: you shouldn't punish players for cleverness, you shouldn't wield consequence as a punitive measure because your plan got derailed. Your problem here was having a rail at all.
Finally, its very, very important to let each and everyone who can reasonably do so -- shine in their moment. Note the first -- if the character is playing like they solve everything ever that's another matter. But if you have your iconic moment of awesome, the GM shouldn't hold to a rigid set of reality that punishes you for it unless you went a bit crazy. Let the player shine.

This is all a little off topic but, hey, you know, it happens.

All of this can be boiled down to: Collaborate. This is a collaborative environment where we all want to have fun.

But accept sometimes the unexpected happens and that's a good thing.

Also, to @Warma-Sheen

"I want a fun, enjoyable environment" is consequence-neutral. It doesn't mean I don't want bad things to happen to my character: it doesn't mean I want good things to happen to my character. I have no preference either way on this at all. What I want is something meaningful to happen to my character.

As it happens, a lot of times that is bad. I'm a big fan of consequences and growth from failure. What I don't like is a roll of a dice or a whim of something or other ending my story in a meaningless way.

But bad? And consequences? This is how people grow.

I RP to create characters that grow.

I third @WTFE

I want to have a fun, entertaining environment. What that means... varies with the situation, the mood, the character, my play-group. As I play with people more I get an idea of what they enjoy, what they don't. I don't check everything with them but if something is off from our usual play-- or if something is starkly off-- I'll gently ask if they want to expand the scope of what we've done.

I'll talk to people, OOC. We can talk about our RP, our plans for where our stories might go. We aren't scripting things out -- what happens is not pre-determined but we can decide my character wants to go from being more timid to getting into a more heroic context. We can create situations to explore that.

My characters have a Voice, ideally, and I can hear it in my head almost -- and I stay true to that Voice. Who the character is. BUT. I still am the author of that characters story: and I am not an author in isolation.

People I would like to think of as at least friendly if not friends are also authors in the same space of me. Us all having fun and having stories we enjoy matters.

The specifics... vary. Some characters I make are irreverent and though maybe shine from time to time are often at least on some level comedic relief. Others are dark and brooding and trying to find humanity. Others are ... etc. It varies. In each I try to find a person or three who while they are not on the same path as the character in question, are on a path to support/develop/reveal the path itself.

Ideally, when my character grows, someone elses does, too. Ideally, we both end things feeling a sense of fulfillment as a chapter or story ends -- and with mushing, the ending of one step may be fuzzy (it may 'end' for different people in different ways and at different places) and it usually just means a turning of the page to a new chapter or story.

There's lots of different ways to have fun. I know some people who want to have fun by minimizing OOC contact almost entirely-- the idea of talking about characters and future development is anathema. I respect that but its not for me.

I enjoy the game when there is an OOC cooperation (with a healthy level of communication that does not lead into the way of coordination) coupled with an IC world that makes sense. I don't ever have my characters do anything that is not IC for them, I believe in staying true to a characters voice, but there's a lot more leeway in this then some people feel, for me. If a character isn't in a fun place, I arrange situations around the character so their IC choices lead them to a place that is fun. Or I stop playing them.

Steam: ixokai
Origin: ixokai
Battle.net: ixokai#1770

@_Haven_ iweb.localecho.net 4201 is the rhost dev site where Rhosticans hang out.

Rhost allows arbitrary named guests, you just list the dbrefs or names in guest_namelist. (I have it set up to randomize this configuration option everytime a guest disconnects on M1963).

That said I have no idea how to do it on MUX, sorry!

The limit is ridiculously high to the point that I swear to god I can not imagine a situation that would hit it unless you were coding EVERYTHING and had a habit of storing EVERYTHING in an EVERYTHING storage room.

I'm really liking rhost's execscript. It runs an arbitrary script written in any language you like and returns its results.

On character approval, it runs a script (a python3 script, specifically) that automatically creates a wiki page with their +sheets, their name, codename, birthdate, and anything else in game (except the bg, for now), all in the correct script. It automatically thats that page with the appropriate tags.

On purge, it replaces the page with a blank template and adds appropriate tags (ie, _retired or _unavailable depending on MC vs OC). This means our wiki is 100%% accurate with currently approved characters-- always. Without users having to know wiki or even signup -- they still can to add photos and more content if they like, but its optional.

Then we have another script that runs by default every night at midnight, or on-demand, which queries the wiki for new logs and adds them into a sqlite database for all participants. So we query that database for activity.

Theeeen there's another script that we run to upload and create a log, all with the right tags-- so again people can get what they 'need' to on the wiki without ever having to be good at wiki-ing.

I have another script that adds or removes tags from specific pages; so when I +faction/add person=faction, they automatically get the faction tag to their page.

All these scripts are allowing deep integration with our wiki.

Next project is to write a script to query the tzinfo database for live timezone conversions so +events and +bbposts are always displayed in your local timezone. (I already have rudimentary hacky versions of this).

And I'm just getting started: the stuff I'm gonna do with the API's....

Anyways, this is all examples of the cool stuff you can do with execscript()

Let's see, other favorite features. I couldn't live without full, deep regeditall and friends. I have some custom substitutions: %'ui' and %'std' so my code often looks like:

$+foo *=*:@attach %'std'/IS-STAFF;@attach %'std'/FIND-TARGET;@set %q<target>=blah.

Basically IS-STAFF looks like this:

&IS-STAFF %'std'=@assert isstaff(%#)={@attach %'ui'/DENIED}

So if %# is not staff, it gives a standard Permission Denied error. Then:

&FIND-TARGET=@assert  t(setr(target,pmatch(%0)))={@attach %'ui'/NOT-FOUND=%0}

The %'std' and %'ui' libs allow me to do common actions without repeating any code. And since these @asserts and @attaches (alias for @include/override), when they decide to halt command processing, it halts everything.

I like that I have some mail() functions that let me completely softcode mail reading-- this lets me, in particular, write +amail so I can read my alts mail and have it marked as read after.

printf() is crazy powerful.

I like the /inline versions of @assert, @dol, and the like-- to run stuff now without queueing. Keeps things speedy.

Linode. The $5/mo is more then sufficient for a mush.

Edit to add: To be clear, that's 1 CPU core, 1GB of ram, 20 GB of SSD storage, and more bandwidth then you will ever, ever, ever need, for both a game and its wiki if you want to host it on there.

@Arkandel said in Project X:

The other question is whether a grid is necessary (okay, 'wanted') at all. From a technical POV it's not so hard to link rooms together, and although I personally care little for grids, I do want this to be open enough to be used by others in the future.

I've often wanted to innovate on grids; specifically, do away with them entirely. Create robust +temproom type code which allows loading/saving of rooms, and all that jazz, but when I've asked here if people would like a game which had no grid but lots of locations to RP in, I got huge negative feedback.

The consensus was the grid made people feel connected to the setting.

On Marvel:1963 staff just wants to be asked if a plot is world-impacting and not self-contained, and even then I don't think we've ever done anything but say 'sounds good have fun' to a plot +request.

@Arkandel said in Project X:

@ixokai That's actually pretty neat. One more question - how much bandwidth would you say a MU* consumes including running a wiki on it, per month? Trying to figure out the right plan here.

Man, bandwidth is irrelevant.

I run Marvel:1963 and others on a linode, and it doesn't even cause a hiccup as far as bandwidth is concerned.

Granted, I use wikidot so don't host the wiki on the server itself, but have before -- and its simply not a thing that mushes and support are something that consumes bandwidth in such a capacity that you even would count.

The resources a mush needs are... minuscule, and that gives a poor showing for how little minuscule is.

@Arkandel said in Project X:

@ixokai: What do you get in the way of system access through linode? For instance can you add your own cron jobs? Install packages (doubtful, but I'm hoping they'd have git otherwise). What about your .htaccess or similar access levels?

I.e. how much rope do you get to hang yourself with without buying a corporate level subscription?

You get complete root access with all packages.

Its a speedy, optimized linux SSD-based VM that isn't on over-crowded servers that you get complete control over.

@Thenomain said in Project X:

@ixokai said in Project X:

@Thenomain said in Project X:

Let me edit my phrasing, then...

Digital Oceans also gives you a Linux slice and SSH console access. I don't know how its web-services support is, tho.

Err.... where?

Are we using the word 'console' differently?

I type, in my nice local terminal shell: ssh thenomain@gameaddy.com

I get a password challenge.

I get a prompt of a console.

I type something like 'echo $0' and I get something like '-bash'.

If we're using the word differently, I don't know how you expect it to be used.

Yeah, that's not console access. That's just a ssh shell.

Console is tty1, its as if your keyboard and screen are plugged directly in.

When you fuck up your firewall and forget to open port 22, you use console access to fix your screw up.

When you want to do a dist-upgrade, you don't do that over ssh, you do it with console access.

Digital Ocean does give you console access via their website-- go into your droplet, and either upper right hand corner click Console, or under Access do Launch Console. It looks like your shell, but its different: it works even if ssh is not installed, as its direct access to... the console. And all web shells I've ever used have sucked.

What Linode does is have a custom ssh server that runs on their systemt that directly connects to each linode's console terminal. So in an emergency, you connect to that and get into your server's console terminal. Your server will often ALSO have a ssh server on it that you connect to directly.

I don't use lish often, but when I need it, nothing else comes close.

@Thenomain said in Project X:

Let me edit my phrasing, then...

Digital Oceans also gives you a Linux slice and SSH console access. I don't know how its web-services support is, tho.

Err.... where?

Are we using the word 'console' differently?

@skew said in Project X:

@ixokai Does the web app have anything built in, like file transfer, or the ability to edit common files, like LocalSettings.php? Also, does it allow you to choose a base server image that already has WikiMedia installed on it?

You can use any editor you like (if you're not comfortable with linux, probably nano): the web app doesn't have file transfer support directly, but you can use any ssh ftp client.

And yes, there's 'stackscripts' which you can use to deploy your image that configures the server image.