Posts made by Jim Nanban

So it's 2019.
I figured out this past year what needed to be done:
Either stand up the rotting DB next to a clean one and do a manual copy-paste job, or do the same with the flatfile.

The first option is simpler. @decompile and then swap some #DBREFs before pasting into the new game.
However, the rotting DB is, well, rotting. There's no guarantee that what I get on an @dec is going to be accurate, especially as uptime increases. Any scheme to reboot it more rapidly is bound to cause even more delay.

The second option is more confusing, but the DB can't rot if I'm opening the flatfile in a text editor.
The formatting of attributes and DBREFs isn't too bad, though. This is pretty doable. Even for unmotivated me!

I think I've found my future for it, too. Twilight: 2000 has been a beloved game of mine since my teenage years. I've had some repeated online interest in it from friends and fellow T2k junkies over the year. I periodically ask these fans to pick a "sine qua non" for playing T2k. So far it's Humvees, distilling fuel, going home/rescuing home, lots of guns, and radiation danger.

Distilling fuel and rads are the only ones of that which would need some coding... and I can see some places in existing code that I might start from for these systems.

Distracted by D&D campaign.

Well I got the Linode set up, with a $20 credit (there was a code, PodcastInIT2018) and giving @ixokai a $20 credit for his referral code too. Quite nice!

It's currently just a blank Fedora 27 box.

I'm enjoying it already, pretty easy to set up. Makes AWS look like the Byzantine empire.

@apu I think he's right, I think it was Baggy

@cupcake I think it's going to take a pain in the ass rebuild, but yeah... once I'm done I'll want to show it off.

If @EUBanana gets it up and running stable (me I think there's unrecoverable database corruption, but I'm sooooo not on his level haha), well that'll be his call for his.

I'll say this right here, I'm certainly sending him the flatfile of whatever rebuild I complete.

6 months to the day just about, and I've set up Linode.com account (thanks @ixokai !) to get the old girl back up and rebuilt from careful copypasta.

At my pace, this is going to take a while. Like, it might be Christmastime before it's done. But figured I should say something on it.

Yeah, he's not just some right-brained fop though. The guy's working on his own self-driving car, and has done other technically tricky things. What I read wasn't clear but it does seem like he turns on the AI for his unit inside the circle during the video.

I suppose in my excitement I didn't lay down a 30,000 word litany of disclaimers and of-courses.
Or linked the article I found for myself on Vice I found via an easy TinEye search.

Or left the fun verbiage and said "Hey fellow RPG fans on an RPG forum about playing RPGs in old text-based servers, does this not look like the kind of thing that would work in a cyberpunk dystopia like many of the RPGs we enjoy, and does that not have cool parallels to the fantasy RPGs we also enjoy? What ho!"

Nah I'll just leave it as "HEAD ASSPLODEY WOW" and add this quote from the tech-savvy artist: "I've got totally carried away in the research, and ended up writing a bunch of my own software, rigging up cameras and building neural networks to reproduce some of the more interesting currents in the field. Like the trap, I wouldn't entirely trust what I've built, but the principles are sound."

And I've shut this down for the time being. I want to thank everyone for showing interest, old and new. Most importantly, thanks to @EUBanana for advice and providing latest DB. And, you know, coding the bloody thing!

What's next for me is to eventually get some alternate hosting, probably Linode. Fire up the provided DB, decompile the Master Room objects, and recompile on a brand new TinyMUSH server. Probably I'll have to recreate some objects too, I think basically for a while I'll have to side-by-side run new and old DBs, with the old version in a "Groundhog's Day" scenario with no dump interval (so it doesn't save the DB) and a daily kill/restart job.

So yeah. Sometime 2018.

This was a really cool experience. It was fun seeing the old girl up!
Seeya not-so-soon!

This just blew my mind. Especially with the comment I saw it tweeted under:
"Using salt circle runes to trap an A.I. car is possibly the most cyberpunk thing ever."
https://twitter.com/Gossenphilosoph/status/884769533810143237

@Thenomain said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

Shift + Insert. They're keys. On the keyboard. Which is a board. With keys on it.

@Thenomain said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

You can also ask: Why is anyone responding to this thread knowing that what they say will have little effect?

Because MU* players (myself included) and the internet as a whole are pedantic twits who wouldn't understand a rhetorical question if it bit them in the--

I will leave this one as an exercise for the reader.

I'll see myself out.

@HelloProject Angry usually sources his quotes, so that must be well-known in game design circles. He plays up the one-true-way-ism, but if you stick around you'll notice he's winking while giving some of the best explanation you've ever heard.

Another thing he brings up which is relatable is learning the core mechanic. Once you realize that just about everything in D&D is basically d20+Ability Bonus+Stat Bonus, you can make rulings instead of referring to rules. Just like on a MUD it's "verb action" or on TinyMUX it's "+verb[/option] target[=change]" you can make educated guesses on syntax versus reading +help file treatises. And it's when someone screws up the pattern--like +verb change=target/stat or saving throws or damned grappling horseshit mechanics--that things go haywire.

@HelloProject said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

The point is, the more stuff you're gonna pile into a game, the lower the difficulty of actually using and figuring out how to use it needs to be. Think about how someone who has never been in a MU before would interact with your code. My first MU was Dragon Ball Evolution (they named it that before the shitty movie came out), a MUD. Everything made sense after a very short while.

This reminded me of what The Angry GM said when explaining why psionics suck in D&D: "Remember, complexity is the currency with which you buy depth. Complexity isn’t inherently bad, but complexity that doesn’t add depth is bad. "

Yeah, a drive-by referencing OP in a 14 page thread. Sue me. (SU* me?)

If I had to guess at when I might do all that, I'd say 2018 earliest.

So after about a month of focusing on other things, I logged back onto my TGG box:

+bbread 1
==============================================================================
                            **** Announcements ****                           
        Message                            Posted        By
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1/1     Documentation and Old Boards       Sat Apr 29    Jim Nanban
1/2   T                                                  
1/3   T                                                  
1/4   T                                                  
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I thought I had killed timeouts. I also know that's just NOT how it's supposed to look.

bbread 1/2

================================ Announcements ===============================
Message: 1/2 (timeout warning)     Posted        Author
                                                 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

==============================================================================

Odd...

+bbread 1/3

================================ Announcements ===============================
Message: 1/3 (timeout warning)     Posted        Author
                                                 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

        The MUSH will crash on occasion. I've only found a couple of consistencies to it.

        The solution I've got right now is a cronjob that fires off ./Startmush every minute, which automagically only starts the MUSH if it's not already running.
        We'll see how it goes!

--
Jim Nanban
MUSH Head (and Ass)
==============================================================================

... and odder. So here's the summary, copypastated from the bbpost I slapped in there:

While I've been occupied with other interests, it looks like the DB rot has crept in ever deeper. Just look at the list of bboard posts. There are blank ones and suchlike oddities. I'm not sure what, precisely, the problem is--but I have seen this happen to another game, and restoration was impossible.

I think the next step would be to shut it down and try to load the MUSH on an older codebase. No, I do not expect this to work, but it is easier and faster than the step to follow: @decompile of core code and pasting into a fresh database. While laborious, that should conclusively resolve the issues. Rebuilding particular grids/maps, while technically possible, would probably be less satisfying than building afresh--although there's a learning curve, as building here is significantly different than elseMU*.

All in all, I'm happy, though. Death has given me the latest database, I've gotten a mild amount of interest in MU* circles (and I wouldn't want more than mild), and there's a solution possible.

I'll post this to MU Soapbox ( http://musoapbox.net/ ) and leave this game up until my next batch of free/interested time.

@HelloProject said in RL Anger:

@Jim-Nanban said in RL Anger:

@HelloProject I refuse to accept what's communicated in your post: That you cannot figure out why someone might be opposed to all forms of discrimination.

And I refuse to accept that you sincerely don't understand the context of the situation and that you're actually making a sincere argument about discrimination. So I guess we're even!

No, seriously, I refuse to believe it. You are here on a forum about games in which people think outside of their own mental space and pride themselves on that ability, and you can't figure it out. This is what you're sticking with? Not trying to be mean, I'm just seriously trying to ascertain the veracity of your claim.

Ignoring literally all context for why women would want a women only event is equivalent to going "Well, fuck you, I've never even heard of a peanut allergy. #allsandwichesmatter."

Oh, you want context, do you? Well, that's related to the objection to all objections on the matter in each direction which I have expressed. Yes, that means I both agree with you and disagree with you. And you, and that other fucktard losing their sense of motherfucking reality in this stupidass argument. Fuck all of you dumb fuckers whenever you're in this thread.

You're all totally cool elsewhere, but here you guys just shit your fucking brains out on purpose. Fuck me up the ass with a boat paddle, why did I not just block this fucking thread the first fucking second I saw the insipid subject line...

@HelloProject I refuse to accept what's communicated in your post: That you cannot figure out why someone might be opposed to all forms of discrimination.

Thanks for the heads up. Gave less than I want, more than I should, but I guess she and I will both be having more peanut butter than we'd like in the next month and that seems fair.

I often joke about how awesome it would be to be hit by lightning. You'd have an excuse--nay, a reason--for any bizarre shit you wanted to do. "What the fuck is wrong with you?" "I got hit by LIGHTNING!!!" There is no comeback. Which is appropriate, as there is usually no comeback from getting hit by lightning.

This is a terrible ramble. Help this kid out if you can.

@Auspice said in RL Anger:

Which means they only care because it's butting in on the realm of dudebro, aka superhero films.

Here's another aspect that's off-the-charts idiotic: Since when do men NOT enjoy watching women watch another beautiful woman prancing around in spandex?! I know these MRA guys think they're trying to help, but stop ruining this for the rest of us!!!!!

@HelloProject Yes, but everyone will just write them off as being hipsters.