Posts made by Kumakun

I'm gonna resurrect this one again! This time with a /little/ bit of a different twist. I'm plotting a codebase, but I need an example RPG engine to use for my pluggable add-ons system. I'm trying to figure out what rulesets are:

a.) Used right now, or are really requested (like SW!) and...
b.) Are least likely to get me served with a cease and desist order once it goes public. I'd hate to put in all of that work and get my hand smacked for using a coveted and unfriendly IP.

The big one that pops into my head right now is FATE, since 'real-time fiction building' is one of my design inspirations, and it has a focus on building your own IP - and it's totally free to use so long as I give proper credit.

I'm fine with safe down to kinda safe, but I'd really like to avoid a Wizards or Palladium 'Knock that $%@!# off' letter from a lawbot.

Thoughts?

@grapenut That's pretty cool! I like the animations in your UI, pretty slick!

@sparks Ah! That makes sense. I feel like it makes even more sense that if we take lessons on information hierarchy, flow, focal zones, etc and apply them towards how a new interface would look/behave.

For the server, I'd be happy with something that had modern interfaces to communicate with multiple devices natively. To me, that means (after this conversation) At least competent telnet ability but primarily a secure WebSocket interface, MAYBE webRTC Data Channel (overkill for text), and a JSON API for web/app integration. Web Portal/Settings Dashboard and detailed client design are for another conversation maybe - or maybe here? This conversation has been very informational and super interesting.

@faraday said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

I have also looked at Discord/Slack/etc. for ideas and mentioned it various times this conversation's come up. A lot of people just RP in Discord, so it's a good starting point for looking at the general paradigm.

What other kinds of places have people jumped too besides MU*s? Again, I've been out of the loop for a little while!

@thenomain said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

@arkandel

I don’t mean literally using Discord. Discord is our modern IRC. IRC RP is fine, but it’s not a Mu*. I mean using these chat systems as an establishment of ideas that can be used for a modern Mu*.

I've been looking to Discord and Slack for how they handle communication at the mobile/desktop level. I actually spent a little time working on a UI inspired by Discord. You're right, we have to look at how people communicate information real-time currently, and where. It's one of the reasons why I'm so pro excellent mobile experience.

@tinuviel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

Sure. But if those future plans aren't aimed at us... why ask for our input? Not aiming this at you fara, but at the thread itself.

ETA: I'm all for making coder's and/or programmers' lives easier, so y'all do what you need to do on the backend to make that work for you. But if you want to include us in this bright new future you've envisioned, maybe don't make radical changes to the bits we use regularly. Make other stuff, sure, but don't penalise us for choosing what we prefer over what's new and fancy.

My intention is definitely not to alienate players. I think we can bridge the gap between veterans and new players. I'm not saying get rid of the terminal, my codebase would support it. It would be functional, usable and polished - but not my focus. Normal Mux commands would work for the most part for my 'base' install so a veteran player can WHO look, page etc. On top of that, I want to add functionality - like sending more data through WebSockets for game/client information, formatting instructions, etc. One of the reasons I think creating a WebSocket protocol to try to standardize things - hopefully without the mudstandards.org fiasco - would be a good idea.

I honestly, like @faraday, want to make a service where you could push a few buttons, turn a few dials and go if you want through GUI, then log into your game through your preferred client (hopefully through a stand-alone WS client. I don't like having to connect through the browser window either. BUT, if you DO want to really modify you can. I'd love a system to encourage others to share in the spirit of open source.

I really appreciate all of your feedback. I know this topic comes up a lot - probably because it's important to people. Some of us see an opportunity for improvement on a thing we're passionate about, and if you have the ability, why not try?

I'll have to fire up Figma soon and bang out a wireframe/semi-mockup of informational hierarchy, and visual weight for a GUI server management dashboard. I love designing interfaces as much as I love programming.

@thenomain said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

@apos said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

What MUs do best as a format is something that is hard to describe to a roleplayers in other formats.

I will nonetheless try:

Real-Time Play By Post

I have used this description to great effect on people who don’t know what a Mu* is.

I've used this description myself! Real-time PbP. More recently, it's real-time Storium with dice. That tends to raise eyebrows. In fact, that philosophy has kind of been at the back of my mind on what updated real-time text-based RP could look like.

Otherwise, in response to this thread in general, “It’s not really a Mush lol” is not helpful. Lord British did not think of that when he made Ultima Online. He said, “I want a Mud, but graphical.”

When Colossal Caverns and Adventure came out, the thought wasn’t to create a new medium, but to make Zork, just online.

Think about what can be done. Getting caught up in the semantics is...well,
many of us are nerds and programmers and can’t help it, but relentless focus on it holds us back.

I agree with this. Both in the way mediums change, and how resistant we can be to it when it involves something we're passionate about.

Edit: And another thing, this “telnet is antiquated” talk should stop. People use SSH daily. Obscuring it is not a bad idea, but throwing out a common protocol just because it’s old is shooting yourself in the foot.

Throw it out because you want to do something that it can’t do.

PFT. Like I need to log in to the CLI of my server every day...

@brent Very good point!

@faraday said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

@tnp said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

And for simple text based gaming, what do we really need? A few extra bells and whistles don't cut it.

People find value in different things. Stuff like dual input windows, not having garbage on your screen because SimpleMU doesn't support the unicode standard used by every modern software program, separating OOC spam and channels and pages stuff in a way that doesn't require you to bend over backwards doing regex's. Incorporating things that are in every chat program under the sun - @mentions, markdown formatting, heck even something as simple as being able to edit a pose or page after you've sent it. And that's not even beginning to touch the sort of interactive things that can move us beyond the type of bbpost <board>=<subject>/<message> commands that are completely alien to an entire generation of people.

There's way more we can do than 'bells and whistles', but it's going to take time to get people shifted.

I would definitely like to talk more on @mentions and markdown formatting. In the age of CSS it's interesting to think how much we let the games handle, and how much we give to the client and still retain some sort of consistency of visual communication.

I'm hearing a lot of mixed reviews, this is great! It's exactly what I wanted. Pain points are the life-blood of innovation. It's interesting hearing from both sides of the aisle as it were, on what to change or not, and why.

I see the importance, for now, of keeping some backward compatibility. While it's dire that we bring new people into the hobby - as that's how hobbies are kept alive - yet we can't forget those that founded the community. Good point!

A web-based MU isn't out of the question, but to get some players to connect there needs to be a client that, from what I'm hearing, works like SImpleMu (spawns spawns spawns!) but handles TCP and WebSocket connections. I'll have to fire up SimpleMu (I still have it installed) and remember what the interface was like! I'm sure just adding inline spell check would win some people over like myself. Heck, using Electron (which I love) you could have a desktop GUI for that, and a desktop interface for admin tasks as well. With PhoneGap (Cordova) a decent native mobile client isn't out of the question. It would be interesting to apply a little modern UI design to the Mu Window layout/hierarchy/priority and get feedback.

I'd definitely want to use MUX as my jumping point for command structure/style, and update as new play/usage patterns evolve. I like the generalized simple database architecture too. I'm not 100% convinced that the game server itself needs a full-on ORM, or flat-files (JS API's don't care either way).

I'm not sure if I'd make an 'in-game' scripting language off the bat, it's extremely possible to do with JS, but adding commands and systems as Node style Dependency Injection or more so Inversion of Control style container 'plugins' for game developers should be the primary way to add new functionality I think. Something that could be done from the CLI or GUI depending on your style. Want a BBS? drop (or click from a list) a plugin, the MU does a dependency check, and go!

Granted, none of this is 'in a weekend easy mode', but it's all been done before several times that I know of, which could be easy to model from without much more than rote programming to get a proof of concept up. Enough to try and start enticing some open source help.

@tinuviel Totally didn't mean any offense, sorry if I came off that way! I think a lot of the conventions of the medium are time tested and solid, but it lacks modern interactions that have become pretty web/social standard that I think would attract a new audience to add to the preexisting community and culture. Who I'm not after, are the telnet or die crowd, I doubt they would leave 1st Gen server technologies anyways.

@tinuviel While I'd love to keep the old-school players happy with their medium, I'm FAR more interested in bringing new blood into the hobby and seeing real-time collaborative fiction writing flourish, even if I have to call it 'MU* roots'

@tinuviel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

@arkandel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

a web-only MU engine

If it isn't telnet, is it MU*?

I bet it would be. It's still MultiUser and text, just the medium is... updating.

@arkandel I wholeheartedly agree. I was /thinking/ of telnet because I wanted to make it approachable for people stuck to their telnet clients.

It would be interesting to define a websocket protocol to standardize server/client communications so someone so inclined could make a ws based client capable of connecting to multiple servers. I entertained a webRTC data connection for a second, but, overkill.

I agree that it's a lot of work, but if the plugin architecture was done right, I'm sure there are others that would be willing to contribute to those replacement systems.

@faraday said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

It is a nice idea, but I think you'll find that easier said than done. Many MU systems interact with each other. You can make a system that fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, but if you try to take out a piece it leaves a hole you have to deal with. It's not like, say, Wordpress plugins where the Events calendar plugin doesn't really need to interact with the SEO plugin or the slider plugin.

That's very true, cross dependencies would be a big concern. It could totally turn into a Skyrm Mod level nightmare! I wonder though if treating the plugin system in a way that's similar to Nodes NPM or Python's PIP, where dependencies are installed with the plugin, might help alleviate some of that pain.

@tat said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

Ares CAN be a complete game out of a box, but there's not really any 'just' about it. It can also be highly customized, if you want to code it. Almost everything in Ares exists as a plug-in you can disable and replace with your own system.

See, I like that. It's a complete game if you're not a developer, but it's customizable enough to make it what you want if you are. I think a premade integrations 'gallery' is a great idea!

@arkandel I'm sure if you kept it to SRD material it would be okay-ish?

@tehom said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

There's a Node codebase called RanvierMUD, but the impression I got from it is that it doesn't use an ORM or database at all, but json flatfiles for storage. I much prefer using django's ORM, but maybe it'd be easier for you to convert Ranvier into using a database with your Node background, I wouldn't know. Evennia is my chosen favorite, though AresMUSH is great too.

Thanks for the response!

I looked into Ranvier and what they're doing for their telnet service. In fact, I may use the ranvier-telnet package since I don't really have much interest in hand-coding a telnet network layer.

I thought about using MongoDB/Mongoose for my ORM but it's pretty sloooow and the MongoDB UUID system is overkill for wanting to make a couple hundred objects in total. The thought of using human-readable JSON files is appealing to me though, plus I could easily turn JSON into object literals and back again no problem for building something like an API with Express. SQL is normally the defacto answer but, in my experience, it's been a pain to make big changes later.

I absolutely love Ares' web integration, it's inspirational. Evennia's integrated too, but I feel Ares focuses more on the community aspect.

I know this is kind of a re-post of an old topic, but I think 2+ years is enough time for opinions/options to change some!

I've been out of the hobby for a while, so I have some gaps in my history that I'm hoping to fill. I have ideas for my next project once my current MUX development slows, so I have time to think, plan, and poll. A little background:

I love MUX! I really do! I've been working with the codebase since the mid 90's. BUT! it doesn't do the interconnected things (beyond iffy SQL) I want it to without a ton of work in a language I'm not the most familiar with and don't have the professional bandwidth to learn more of at the moment. I'd like to stick to the languages I use for work. Currently, that's an insane amount of Node and other JS frameworks (with some Python, PHP, (No)SQL, etc - I do a lot of full stack development and mobile UX/UI design.)

I'm curious to learn what other projects are/where out there that tried to add to/improve on the MU experience, and how you feel they succeeded or failed. The only 'next generation' servers I know of that are currently doing pretty good are AresMUSH and Evennia. Are there others?

I know I personally would love to add connection caching on the server side, and push notifications on new activity for mobile interfaces, to combat the dreaded mobile RPing 'sleep mode'. Honestly, improving on the whole non-desktop experience in general.

I know change is kind of a tough topic, but I'm honestly looking for constructive conversation. What's worked well what hasn't? What did people think was going to be the 'next big thing' that wasn't, or was?

Thanks for your feedback!

In the spirit of 'getting #@#$! done, I've decided to make little posts here to let everyone know that we're still very much alive and moving ever closer to opening.

I just cleared staff to start using the wiki, the theme is finally stable enough for content (until I'm done with my extensions later!). Things are starting to move over. I predict we'll be ready for our first small beta really soon, so keep an eye out! I'll also post a link to the Wiki as soon as there's something to look at.

Feel free to join us on Discord for more frequent updates, ask questions, plot, plan and hang out! https://discord.gg/F7ZZT8p