Best posts made by Mercutio
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RE: Travel Times - Enforced?
I'll just pipe in with a tiny short tidbit that I've learned, and tried to keep in mind when designing MUSHes.
The amount of barrier between two people being able to RP together is in an inverse relationship to how much RP will occur.
Aka, 'RP should have as few barriers to entry as feasible'.
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RE: Serious Question About Making A MU
I feel like this is a required response.
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RE: Brilliant Breakthroughs and Impossible Projects
For the longest time, I've had issues where I wish there was a way to save information to a database like SQL, in some known format, and be able to query it. I don't just mean 'just use SQL', but I mean advanced features like... 'related topics', etc.
I basically wanted Graph based storage. I tried using oqgraph, since MariaDB gives access to that, and with MariaDB being binary compatible with MySQL, I could use it. But it isn't well maintained, and it tended to crash things. So I dropped that. (Read: Don't use OQGraph for SQL Graph Storage, it's a trap!)
I recently actually started work on this anew, and in doing so fixed a bug in PennMUSH's SQL handling that enabled single-return Stored Procedures -- creating Graph based functions in SQL. However, SQL isn't really made for this... with enormous tables, this'll get slow. (Read: Stored Procedures for SQL Graph Storage is the best option at the moment)
It's roughly detailed here:
http://mush-mercutio.tumblr.com/post/153345784737/pennmush-graph-frameworkIf I finish this, I may at some point rewrite SceneSys to use this kind of storage, and launch some basic things along with it, like a basic BBS and a basic Jobs system as a POC.
Being reflected on the MUSH and on SQL, would allow easy grabbing through websites, etc.
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RE: A New Star Wars game? (Legends of The Old Republic (Name pending))
@faraday said in A New Star Wars game? (Legends of The Old Republic (Name pending)):
I'm a casual Star Wars fan, which is to say I've watched the movies and played a few of the video games. I know jack about whatever time period y'all are talking about here. Jedi Civil War? Mandalorian war? Revan? No bloody clue, and I'd frankly be uncomfortable trying to jump into such a setting.
If you are interested, watch the following video. It 'summarizes' the matters of the era quite well. And honestly, if one transcribed this (something that probably already exists), it'd make a suitable History/Timeline file.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeboxMqdXdE@faraday said in A New Star Wars game? (Legends of The Old Republic (Name pending)):
But that's kinda my point... "Star Wars!" to me is Empire vs Rebels or (to a lesser extent) Clone Wars. Anything else may as well be an original theme for all it resonates with me.
I would say that The Old Republic times is /quite/ different from Empire vs Rebels. It's far closer to Clone Wars in that regards. Mysticism, turning dark to light and vice-versa, massive wars, and force use on a massive scale runs rife.
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RE: Star Wars?
@lithium
I'd like to say that can be a bit poor design on the part of the GMs / admin if that is the case. It's really not /that/ hard to adjust for that. (Unless they just allow for max level 20 doods to mix with level 1s. You don't want THAT big of a disparity.) -
RE: Finish to Start Dependency - Something like @wait/wait()? (Tiny)
As long as you remain within the functions, or command-lists, it should be fine.
It's when your command lists start containing the following specific commands: (@dolist, @wait, @trigger, are the ones I can think of)@emit a; @dolist b c d=@emit ##; @emit e;
That you'll get stuff like:
a e b c d
This is because of how command queues work. This gets resolved with doing stuff like:
@emit a; @dolist/notify b c d=@emit ##; @wait me=@emit e;
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RE: A New Star Wars game? (Legends of The Old Republic (Name pending))
@mr-johnson said in A New Star Wars game? (Legends of The Old Republic (Name pending)):
@Seraphim73 Honestly I was thinking of allowing people to have 4 alts but only ONE can start at 8 and the rest at 3 giving people the chance to level as they go if they want...
Might I recommend a 3-5 or 5-8 split? Lower the 'distance' between the 'low' and the 'high' of initial application. 8 is a typical choice for the prestige classes it brings. So it depends on what kind of game you want to run off the get-go; a heroic higher level romp, or a start-from-nothing type.
(And know that you can, over the duration of the game, raise these starting levels as your needs change)
As usual, I agree with the level 12/13/14 absolute halt, as SAGA breaks down severely after those levels.
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RE: MU Flowchart
@Ashen-Shugar
That'll get you the young'ins, but to get the really good coders, you'll have to also /really/ get them excited. And keep them excited through the project.Aka: Don't make them write the theme files, policy files, etc.
P.S. Also, good lord, getting a lot of upvotes for what basically was 'go to a site, download a file, upload it elsewhere', when Thenomain did all the work.
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RE: PennMUSH Code Help
It's the LANG option in the 'restart' file. Set it to:
en_us.iso8859-1
Or
En_USDepends on your distribution.
Use the accent() function to test.
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RE: A New Star Wars game? (Legends of The Old Republic (Name pending))
@tinuviel said in A New Star Wars game? (Legends of The Old Republic (Name pending)):
Oh. Another... suggestion. Don't limit prestige classes (specifically in CG) based on stupid reasons. "Oh you can't take the Jedi Knight prestige class in CG because you need to get knighted IC."
As the guy that runs a game that does this due to policy inheritance - I echo this.
You can make the applications stricter around more difficult concepts if needed. -
RE: MU Flowchart
@Thenomain said in MU Flowchart:
@Mercutio said in MU Flowchart:
And then you get to Regular Expressions, the ins-and-outs of Command-style vs Functional-style (and their hybrid conventions) and what the pros and cons are for both, inheritance, controls / permissions, SQL interactivity, and the true test... fold()
With luck, someone can go their entire Mu* code career without any of this but inheritance and some limited permissions, which is just a subset of "grab an attribute".
I would rather someone learn how to abstract repetitive code blocks via function calls. And the ins and outs of flags. And come to think of it, a competent coder should be prepared to be a halfway competent builder which means a basic understanding of the various object types and how they interact.
I agree that most likely folk won't know those, and probably don't need to know them. But there's that dangerous difference between 'knows how to grab an attribute with the right permission set' and 'sets all objects wizard so they don't need to deal with permissions'. (Or: 's() evaluates the attribute I just grabbed, totes safe, right?' aka 'enactor, what's that?')
Most of the others I mentioned is just mastery for when you want to master the system and maybe have some big coding plans in mind.
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RE: Custom Channel System on PennMUSH?
You don't even need to use @fo. You can just do:
$alias *:+channel %0
Or
$alias *:@chat channel=%0
There is also a common hardcode patch to add mux channel aliases sitting around somewhere, if you have shell access.
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RE: A New Star Wars game? (Legends of The Old Republic (Name pending))
@seraphim73 said in A New Star Wars game? (Legends of The Old Republic (Name pending)):
@mr-johnson said in A New Star Wars game? (Legends of The Old Republic (Name pending)):
@mercutio The thing is, there's a big part of me that wants to focus on the people who did have a reason to be a part of the Mandalorian war, make the game more focused by requiring characters to have some connection to the war. I think by having everyone having picked a side one way or another or just plain being connected to it you've got some built in plot hooks right off the bat. But that's just me.
Yes. Yes. Please. Tie the characters together as neatly as possible. Even if they're all on different sides, make it so that all the characters have an explicit tie to the war, so they all care about events there. The smuggler who wants absolutely nothing to do with the war and ignores it? Is going to be ignoring most of the other PCs too, which is not good.
I agree absolutely that it is desirable for people to make characters who have an explicit place in the war. But say you create a Jedi, (disclaimer, working off of memory here), you now have no reason to be involved in the Mandalorian War unless you are part of the... what were they called? Interventionists? [Not specifically the Revanists]. This pidgeon-holes you into a certain concept space.
I'm not saying that rewarding this desirable quality is a bad thing. It's just that you want to have a plan in place to aid people in having reasons to be there. In a perfect world, every player would constantly bring a good reason for their character to be there. But we don't live in a perfect world, and it generally is the role of the theme/plot/head-wiz to try and assist its players at least somewhat in this.
Additionally, you have the idea that writing a plot isn't about a straight line towards the result - having offshoots that spiral together into a path is generally what you 'want' to aim for. Though, admittedly, that can be difficult unless you have a larger sum of players & admin.
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RE: Searching for Star Wars RPI
@Seraphim73 said in Searching for Star Wars RPI:
Whether there are any abilities that actively keep players from being included in RP is more of a game culture call, in my opinion... if Staff allows players to tear down other players for picking up particular abilities, that's a bigger problem with the game's culture in my opinion.
We definitely don't appreciate that behavior - but we're not omniscient. At times, that kind of behavior slips through the cracks (or is done in pages, and invisible to us). It's unfortunate
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RE: Almost Real-Time Weather System
Reminds me of the code I had on Angelic Layer MUSH. I had a CRON running that'd store data into SQL after grabbing from weather underground. As Angelic Layer MUSH was 2 years behind real-world, and weather underground had historical METAR data, I could grab stuff form the Tokyo Airport.
Don't think they had an API at the time. And just reading their pages was a bit annoying.
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RE: Star Wars: Dawn of Defiance
@Meg said in Star Wars: Dawn of Defiance:
@Mercutio said in Star Wars: Dawn of Defiance:
In regards to the idea of older characters having more power - this is indeed the case. But there is a hard level cap. And while there are side-upgrade options, the costs climb heavily after a certain point. It's not perfect, but not the worst as a system. It's something we watch.
@Mercutio said in Star Wars: Dawn of Defiance:
Transparency with staff is harder to define or even comment on, as I am uncertain in what way that word is being used in this instance.
Ok, but like, how many of those older characters who have hit level cap but have a shitton of side-upgrade options are in the hands of staff? That's what I'm talking about looking at, and what I am talking about re: transparency.
I mean, I am glad you guys know your factions (spheres. potatoes. whatever you want to call them, really) but knowing who is getting all the cool stuff and getting to do the cool things is important, too. I'm not here to tell you how to run your game, but if all staff have really old characters with a lot of influence because of the things that they have, you can bet it's going to make your game less appealing to people.
Gotcha. Soft Level cap (level 12) has - ignoring NPCs - 13 players. Of which 3 are admin characters due to long-term play. We track the side-upgrades as well in sheet notes - of which Risi likely has the largest sum, but I don't think the top 5 contains further staff characters. There are 3 characters with a level above the soft level cap, a sum that contains 1 admin played character (Risi, who was the third one to get there), and no characters at the hard level cap (14).
We watch the cool stuff, and the levels, and the influence. Though, of all the admin characters, Risi is the only one with notable 'influence', and it's not even a lot. She's just an indie. No direct influence in any of the major organizations (Empire, Rebellion, or the crumbling Republic).
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RE: Almost Real-Time Weather System
@Thenomain
Damn right it was a PITA.But hey, it taught me Regular Expressions, so... win/win?
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RE: Star Wars: Dawn of Defiance
@Warma-Sheen said in Star Wars: Dawn of Defiance:
@Faceless said in Star Wars: Dawn of Defiance:
@Warma-Sheen I think you're being a bit more critical than is necessary. Honestly it comes off as though you feel wronged by the current staffers, for the actions of past staffers.
I could very well be more critical than is necessary. I can admit that. Maybe it just feels more personal to me because it is me. I know that's a thing. But my experience and opinions about Mercutio have nothing to do with previous staff. Everyone's accountable for their own stuff. Myself, included.
@Mercutio I really find it hard to believe that the "interpretation" was a misunderstanding. But if you say it was, then there's no point in trying to argue. You know your intentions better than I would. If you're not doing the same things I experienced anymore and other people aren't experiencing the same issues, then great. I love Star Wars and more places to play, the better. But everyone has to decide for themselves and no one reading can say they weren't warned if your song remains the same.
No hard feelings man. I understand that experiences can color one's future ones.