Posts made by Kumakun

I thought I'd share what I've been up to with you bunch of salty dogs. I decided to spin up a MUX, proxied a WebSocket, and have fun with the old Pueblo integration. So far the results are pretty promising! And, once I do this the first time I can repeat it on any 2.12 codebase (probably earlier!) with a little configuration. Anyways, always fun unburying old protocols and giving them a little new polish.

The template so far!

Hello, all you mushcode dinos! I've recently been improving on the logic behind my mushcode preprocessor. Mainly I've been testing aginst Theno's CoFD codebase for quirks. It passes as far as I can tell! Check it out! https://format.ursamu.io The code and readme are available at https://github.com/digibear-io/mush-format

Feel free to play with the demo and let me know where I can improve by leaving an issue on the GitHub repo! Or a star if you're feeling generous.

Thanks for reading!

More updates! @Thenomain has been dutiful in helping me fix formatting edge cases. It's also had a bit of a UI update too! Give it a whirl! (Mush-Formatter) If you run into any issues please drop them at The Github Repo? That would be super awesome.

Thanks!

I've re-tooled the code to be waaay more efficient. I've been working with @Thenomain to clean up some of the rough edge-cases. I still need to wire the portion that allows you to minify an archive from Github, but work calls for now! Check it out, give it a spin. https://mush-format-client.herokuapp.com. If you run into any bugs and feel like reporting them? https://github.com/digibeardev/mush-format/issues.

Thanks all!

@Sparks said in Alexa Skill Idea: MU* Client:

@Kumakun said in Alexa Skill Idea: MU* Client:

I just did a quick search on Alex and WebSockets, and looks like they're actively supported by Alexa/AWS services now. I'll have to look into the limits on data chunk size limits, but I doubt a text pose is going to be greater than what it can handle. Alexa Skills Kit has come a long way in the past few years!

AWS has supported WebSockets in the AWS API Gateway service and similar stuff since... I wanna say December of last year? But I didn't remember anything about Alexa in that particular announcement. If Alexa skills have now got a way to use persistent WebSockets to maintain a connection from request to request, that definitely makes it somewhat easier; it used to be you had to use a proxy server for Alexa to do anything with WebSockets.

(Though every MU* that supports websockets uses a different protocol over that socket; the skills would have to be specific to the server family—like one for PennMUSH, etc.—or else you'd end up using a proxy backend to connect to games anyway. Even if that proxy server used websockets rather than being polled, which makes it marginally less horrible, albeit still a privacy concern for some players since that proxy server could log everything going through it: passwords in the connect command, pages to people, the @mail you read, etc.)

And yeah, I assumed the UX would be utterance based; you would definitely not want to leave the context of the MU* client skill while using it. But even maintaining context, you have that request/response UX cycle to deal with, which is the bigger issue.

And transcription seems the worst bit of all. Leaving aside the 10-second limit on audio transcription, there's the matter of syntax on the average MUSH. Pose and page and look and movement are probably easy enough, but many standard MUSH commands could be absolutely wretched for an interface like this. Imagine trying to tell it how to transcribe +bboard commands to write a post, or to dictate the sort of commands that many WoD games use in their chargen systems.

And I don't even want to think about stuff like Arx's plots or goals system, where the syntax can get particularly convoluted: something like goals/rfp <goal>,<story-beat>=<IC description of goal achivement>/<OOC note to staff about goal achievement> (...which I may even have gotten wrong, because I'm not on the game to check the helpfile right now!) is not the most friendly single-line command syntax to remember even when typing. Trying to dictate that to Alexa could end up being an infuriating experience.

That said, despite all these hassles, it's an interesting project to tackle! If you choose to go forward with it, I wish you luck; it'd be an interesting result to see, and might well be useful to folks out there!

I'm really going to have to look into the time limit and connectivity. It's worth researching now though if there's interest. Now to see if the tech can handle it, and the UX isn't a nightmare. I'm going to have to experiment soon. I have a feeling that I'd have to write some custom backend to make it work.. if it will work. That and not being able to recognize 'original' names might be a breaking problem. We'll see!

@faraday said in Alexa Skill Idea: MU* Client:

@Sparks Yeah that does sound feasible, but it's still not something that your off-the-shelf Penn/Tiny/Rhost game is going to support. You'd have to have that intermediate server to manage the connections to the various games. That's a bit more involved than just making an Alexa skill to talk to games directly, and it invokes privacy concerns and so forth.

And I share your concern about the skill UX too. Having to say "get me new activity from <game>" over and over is not great UX.

Yeah, the UX is something that I've been really thinking about. It could get hella repetitive, VERY quick. It looks like you can activate a skill and then just use relevant utterances. Interesting. That might cut down some. Plus I think if new poses notified of their existence first, and you told the skill to read it, it could be the audio version of the 'more' command.

I just did a quick search on Alex and WebSockets, and looks like they're actively supported by Alexa/AWS services now. I'll have to look into the limits on data chunk size limits, but I doubt a text pose is going to be greater than what it can handle. Alexa Skills Kit has come a long way in the past few years!

@Sparks Wow! Great input! I'm going to have to look into that further myself!

Okay, I'm finally back in the coding hot-seat again after a few months of recovery. This project is probably my first free-time priority because I could definitely use it to continue my own project. That, and React has gotten WAAAAY easier since I wrote this originally. It's time to update and simplify.

I also have plans for a desktop version, so you can preprocess and compile code from your desktop, before uploading the archive to Github, if you want quick personal access or to share.

I've been doing quite a bit of research into Alexa Skills recently. Interesting stuff! NodeJS is an everyday tech layer for me, so I started digging further. I eventually came across a few choose your own adventure games and thought... Mu* might transfer well to audiobook format!

I automatically wonder if I should use MUX's HTML flag/XML feature, or if Rhost or Penn offer something similar. Penns WebSocket support in enticing. JSON support makes everything so much easier.

I imagine it wouldn't be much different than adding support for screen readers. Admittedly I haven't played much with Alexa yet myself, it just recently popped up during a client interview, and my ADHD took off with it! I wanted to get a bit of community feedback before I fully committed to the idea, or moved on.

I thought It'd be a great interface for the visually impaired.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

@Kumakun said in WoD Games in the Works:

@skew said in WoD Games in the Works:

Which I just realized I wrote that pretty backwards as the two important pieces of information are above. Crescent Moon Mux and City of Shadows, both WoD 2E games that have stalled(?).

Kind of! We collectively decided to take a break till after the holidays blew over. We all got hit with RL responsibilities it seems like. You know how it goes! We're not far from soft opening, we just need... staff honestly. Pretty much the same problem others are having I'm starting to notice!

That being said, if you're reading this and interested in helping out? Join the discord channel: https://discord.gg/F7ZZT8p I'm Ghede there, and normally online (though slow most times). I'd love to talk! </shamelessPlug>

No official announcements have been made yet, but the wheels of progress are grinding slowly again! More soon on our thread!

@skew said in Crescent Moon MUX: The state of things and a poll!:

@Kumakun I got some BIG IDEAS for a V5 game. I actually started to code it all out before I saw a squirrel and my attention wandered off.

From the perspective of someone who really dug into this, I offer this: V5 is a fresh mix of a familiar system. It's new enough that people will be approaching with new eyes, but similar enough that you can learn as you go.

The big big big BIG difference between VtR and V5 is really the big difference between VtM and VtR more generally. The former is a whole world you play in. The latter is a system to build a setting. Players will come into V5 expecting a lot of the existing story to be present. That story, imo, is a little one dimensional and railroady. There's not a lot of nuance, and there's some big giant sweeping things (such as clan alliance) that just... have no ground in any kind of rational thought.

All that said, I think you can tweak ThenoCode for V5 without much issue. I am, ofc, here to help!

Oooh. Okay. So if I understand correctly, V5 IS Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition.

I'm totally down to hear ideas! Theno's code is a good base. With a little modification, it'd do the job just fine. Did you make a public repo of your Rhost port?

@Lisse24 said in Crescent Moon MUX: The state of things and a poll!:

I assumed V5 was 5th Ed Vampire and voted for it. V5 has the systems in place that you'd want for a MU. Namely, it allows for social combat, territory, influence. I've been (slowly) playing around with a set-up for my own V5 game and would be willing to collaborate/share any of my work.

Collaboration is always fun! What codebase are you targeting? I'm going to look at the differences today.

@Arkandel said in Crescent Moon MUX: The state of things and a poll!:

@Kumakun I voted for V5 just because that doesn't exist any more. It'd be a good experiment (and perhaps an interesting niche) to have a game running that system.

I must have my acronyms mixed up. V5 doesn't equal 5th edition? I just picked up my copy and really liked it.

Awesome! I was Kerberos (Staff) on WC.

We've totally stalled out for now; Some staff issues, life commitments, you know. I still think NOLA is a really cool setting for a vampire-themed game, so we're not giving up!

In the meantime, Crescent Moon has become my testing ground for MUX support web tools written in trusty ole JavaScript. My first project is an attempt at a repeatable semi-automated softcode installation system. My first pass for the project is an RP system and accompanying Chargen. Which should I work on, and more importantly, which would you rather see on a single sphere Vampire game?

@Thenomain's code is pretty good! It's a bit of a pain to install at the moment. In fact, it inspired me to make a better system to install code. The current solution tends to mangle certain character combinations when you feed it long strings. If I remember correctly @skew would install bit by bit to get around that bug.

@Thenomain If you wouldn't mind trying to break it again?

Updates!
You no longer have to use hyphens to separate commands! At this moment it recognizes @ and & prefixes in the first position of the line as the start of a new attribute/command.

Copying and pasting from non-text sources don't create weird HTML artifacts in the input box anymore. I'm not sure about the cross-browser compatibility of my solution, so let me know!

I'm still really interested in hearing about what kind of features MU-Format should have! I'm going to start writing MUX compatible library add-ons that you'll be able to try out through the options button on the website: https://mu-format-dev.herokuapp.com

@faraday said in Mu-Format, a MUSHCode (un)formatting library.:

@kumakun What do you mean by blocking on &, @, +? Those don’t really define blocks; they can exist in the middle of other commands.

Wrong term, sorry! But yes, deciding on where to end the previous block. delimiter? Words.

@Thenomain Interesting! I wondered how Muxify did it. Thanks for putting the system through some paces for me. I've got more to tinker with now, yay!

I'm pretty sure I can build a regular expression that only looks for those characters at the beginning of a line, and ends when it runs into one again. Right now comments are a regex as well. I may have to not be lazy about it and scrub through for comments line by line manually!

@thenomain Thanks for checking it out! I can totally see the formatting fiasco in the dev client on the entry side. I also noticed that I couldn't clear the text when I copy/pasted either. I'll have to update the code to take innerHTML into account as well.

I really want to get rid of the - for blocking, badly. I'm just not sure how I want to approach non-prefixed commands. I can totally block on &, @, the 'in game' prefixes, and the classic +. I suppose I could make a #tag for a non-prefixed command. $ or #cmd <stuff> so it doesn't get blocked in with the command before it. What do you think