Best posts made by Ninjakitten

@crawfish I see your reactions to this situation are tangled.

@ominous They could both be women.

@Bobotron Have you tried yanking the little black circle with a white caret in it (above the title, aligned with the bold button) upward already? It should pull the whole posting area to where you can see the bottom bit of the input box, unless I misunderstand your problem.

@krmbm said in How to BeipMU: The best MU Client for Windows:

Yeah, I don't Discord enough to bother joining a server. So, if anyone does and wants to send feedback? Being able to move the tabs to the top would be awesome.

Someone's going to shank me for triple posting, but tabs on the top is now in the current beta release. It's very exactly the bottom taskbar moved to the top below the menus, and I think it should settle in fine with SimpleMU muscle memory.

@skew said in How to BeipMU: The best MU Client for Windows:

More about Input Windows...

And by prefix I mean you can do /newinput 'chat' and it will make a new input window wherein everything you enter into that window is automatically prefixed with chat.

I tested this out for OOC conversation in one world, and found one important thing to add to this: since it's possible someone might want a prefix that butts right up against the text sent, if you don't you have to include the space in your prefix. So for something like OOC, it should be not /newinput 'OOC' but /newinput 'OOC '. Hopefully, that might save someone else some confusion. But it works a treat once you set it up.

Also @Tat sorted out some IC-text-message formatting that almost threatens to drag me kicking and screaming into the 21st century, y'all. It's pretty slick.

@Sparks said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

my trick was to say under my breath what the shape/color was when it appeared

That is definitely the sort of thing I do, yeah. And patterns and rhymes and rhythms and associations and sometimes just repeating the word or list over and over in my head, though if something pulls me out of that and I didn't have something to rebuild it like a pattern I spotted/created then it's probably mostly gone.

ETA: using timers is literally one of the three reasons I have a smartwatch.

For a long time I had a watch with a dedicated timer button, and a row of marks across the top. 30 20 15 10 5 3 1. Every time you hit the button it went up one level, so if you wanted five minutes, just press the button three times. 15? Five times. And it was small and round and plain black and when I put a leather band on it it didn't even look like a digital at a glance. I really miss that watch. It was ridiculously useful to me through high school and college.

@crayon

#1: You may be right that the bridging is basically @Jeshin's thing/remark, and I might only be interpreting the text on the site about having "more in common than what separates us" in light of his comments on that and that all text-based RPGs are involved.

#2: Yes, quite possibly what's been written reads differently to people who are involved with RPI-like games and people who aren't.

So, to explain how it reads to me, here's that blurb:

"Optional Realities is a community and design blog for text-based, online Roleplaying Games with a focus on character and story-driven games that include permanent character death as a feature. While many call this genre of game an RPI (Roleplaying-Intensive Game), Optional Realities is dedicated to all games of this nature, whether they be MUDs, or MOOS, or MUXs, or MUSHes, or RPIs, or any of the other sub-genres that we've divided ourselves into over the years."

Okay. The way it's written, "this nature" refers to two separate though potentially overlapping types of games: "text-based, online Roleplaying Games with a focus on character" and "story-driven games that include permanent character death as a feature". Neither of these descriptions covers the idea of automation in any way.

ALL the games in question -- RPI-style, low-automation non-consent, consent -- are "text-based, online Roleplaying Games with a focus on character" and most are "story-driven games that include permanent character death as a feature". The ones that are not are still story-driven, just lacking "permanent character death as a feature".

The text then says that many call that sort of game -- text-based, online, character-focused, story-driven, includes possibility of permanent death -- an RPI. That's fine. But as it then goes on to say, RPIs are only one example of that type, so that doesn't suggest that a reader ought to assume you only mean games which closely resemble actual RPIs.

"This nature", as described in the apparent mission statement, is not RPI codebase and specifically says it isn't, but it doesn't mention the qualifications that narrow down "this nature" to where it doesn't cover low-automation MU*s. Because of that, when you say they don't qualify, you may mean that they don't fit what you consider the requirements for the RPI-like genre, but what you're actually saying is that they don't fit the requirements that have been stated: that they are not character- and story-driven text-based online rpgs (with permanent character deaths).

So, ways to make it more clear. First, I'm not certain if you really mean to have two types there -- if you only mean the sentence to be one joint type, "text-based, story-driven online role-playing games which focus on character and include the potential for permanent character death" might be closer. I would add 'highly-automated' in there, personally, if I wanted to narrow things down to RPI-like games, since otherwise it still includes the type most popular here (...which apparently need a name). There might be a better term, and it still leaves the question of "well, what's 'highly'?" but you already have that problem anyway, and so far I can't think of a better term for what the true divider seems to be. You also might define this type as "RPI-like" or "RPI-style" or something similar to that, because it's much shorter to write, seems likely (to me) to give the right sort of impression of your meaning to people involved with games of that type, and seems less likely to leave people involved with other types feeling alienated.

Obviously this doesn't cover any remarks made or impressions given in posts early in this thread, but for the outside view of the mission statement itself, there's my thoughts.

I learned about talkers in a 'how to use/things to do on the internet' book, and hung out on one of those for about a year before my high school got internet access and I noticed an interesting-looking connection someone had when I did a w. So I telnetted to that address and discovered MU*.

Initially I tried it out because it reminded me of what I already liked, but it was Star Trek based rather than being just sort of a random hang-out, and the differences between it and what I was used to were interesting. And in all honesty, two of the things that drew me in were the same things that had with the talkers: 1) despite a fair bit of social anxiety, I like being around people, and these let me do it under my own terms -- whenever I wanted, easy to leave, not necessarily with physical proximity, and 2) people liked me. I'd never been a particularly popular kid, and in middle school I was practically a pariah, so it was kind of mind-blowing to suddenly be someone people thought was cool and funny and appealing to hang out with.

But I switched over because I liked RP, which was new to me then (beyond playing make-believe as a younger kid, which I had loved). I liked the idea that you could come up with your own character to do things in this fictional world, and also still talk to and hang out with people as yourself. I was a theatre kid, and I liked the sort of on-stage/off-stage effect.

Having a place where people liked me when I was being myself is probably what kept me in at the beginning, because the RP itself wasn't really that good for a while. But I liked writing, and I always particularly liked dialogue and characterization, and once I got to a place where things, as @Arkandel said, click, that was probably it. My own character surprising me with a reaction is definitely one of those feelings, and relatedly, when I can't figure out why s/he did it until days or weeks later when suddenly it's entirely clear and makes complete sense. Actually, all three of his examples, definitely.

I like the persistence in changes in characters and world, and I like the ongoing nature. I like the lack of graphics -- I've tried RPing on MMOs and SL, but if you pose throwing Bob down the bar and I can see both of you just standing there, I have no immersion. In text, that's not an issue. And I love words. Oh, and speaking of immersion, I like being able to feel for my characters, and other characters, and I've never really found that anywhere else.

Also, the real-time, online, collaborative creativity aspect is fascinating enough I made it my focus in grad school, so there's that.

...these days I'm also appreciating the fact that it doesn't have to be as ephemeral as something like TT or LARP. I have logs that are old enough to vote, now, that I can still go back and read and really get into the stories again. That's kind of awesome. I wish I'd logged everything from the start.

Continuing my new tradition of belated mentionings, 4.00.282 is out. It brings us nested aliases (this can be useful in some advanced alias uses, and might still have its function adjusted slightly in future, so if you find it doesn't work as you expected it to please pass that on), and alt+# tab changing was enhanced so that control adds 10, so Alt+Ctrl+4 gets you to tab 14. Also bugfixes and all that jazz.

@Selerik That used to be me, and then someone convinced me that I was basically telling people who were being nice that they had terrible judgement and putting them in an awkward position by refusing to accept their effort, so I got better at learning to say 'thank you' instead of denying. It helped at first to also say things like "it's really kind of you to say so" because it reminded me and also felt less like saying "why yes I AM awesome!" as I was trying to retrain myself.

It's still hard now and then but as a bonus I also actually feel better about getting compliments now! Even for things where I still think my X is pretty awful, it's nice to think someone else can see the good in it. For me, at least, it was a thing worth working on.

@Jeshin said:

Our website since the 1st week has had the request to contribute an article on our contact us page.

That is sort of... actively not the point.

@Arkandel
I don't think that was missed. The remark wasn't "I wish all games were like this," it was "I really wish others would try new things like this," and the initial post did say "it's NOT for everyone."

I wish people would try more new things too, but I'm still also going to keep playing games where I play one form of one character in one world indefinitely, and I also very much acknowledge that getting people on board with the new thing you want to try is not often easy. It can be a much bigger risk than giving people more of what they're used to. Even if they hate parts of it, 'better the devil you know' became a phrase for a reason, and I've definitely looked at things in the past and included 'do I want to deal with something unfamiliar at the moment' among the determining factors. But if people don't try new potential solutions to problems, we don't find more things that work. So yeah. I'd like to see more of that, and wish I'd have the time and energy to help try them all out.

Personally I think I pretty much do require a certain level of persistent character to really get into a game. I think it's really interesting how HorrorMU has managed to use the meta-story to create one of those while still focusing the stat-relevant, 'action' portions of events on the sub-stories. I've idly wondered how another game might handle it for a similar setup without essentially taking the whole meta-framework (as so far known) as part of things, but @friarzen's ideas there sound interesting!

Been a little since the last update, but the dev's been busy and now, 4.00.296 is upon us!

4.00.296 - 2020-6-20

• Lots of mapping improvements (images, labels, rotation, z-ordering, easier exit naming, save as png, and more!) -- (...for real the maps are pretty neat. >_>)

• Changed input window to allow applying bold & italic font styles to the display font

• Changed Triggers/Macros/Aliases to allow all to be open at once (instead of just one of them)

• Changed pueblo processing to eat xch_page and img xch_graph tags -- (If you are on a Pueblo-enabled game and run into weird tags, please come to the Discord and tell Bennet about them! It's not entirely standard between games so he has to add a lot of them individually.)

• Changed disconnect due to network error to connect again after connect timeout

• Improved spawn 'Copy Line instead of move' to also work during a spawn capture

• Added animated gif support in the image viewer pane -- (I know some people definitely wanted this! If you don't like them moving, you can right-click your image pane and untick 'Animate gifs'. )

• Added new option, 'send unrecognized commands', to bypass needing to use the // prefix to send a line starting with / directly to a server

• Added Hash text coloring option to triggers (colors the text based on a hash value of the matched words) -- (you can create highlight triggers based on patterns and let them pick their own, consistent colour for each of the things that match, such as channel names.)

• Added global shutoff for restore logs (Options->Logging->Restore Logs->Enabled)

• Added auto folder creation to logging (if a log filename has folders that don't exist, they're created automatically)

• Added global logging default (with variables to auto generate nice folder structures)
  For example: %userprofile%\Documents\Logs\%server%\%character%\%date%.txt -- (This pattern would get you things like C:\YourName\Documents\Logs\Servername\Charname\2020-06-20.txt [if you have your date format set to yyyy-MM-dd, anyway]. You can repeat variables if wanted, so if %date%.txt were instead %server%_%character%_%date%.txt, you'd get files like Servername_Charname_2020-06-20.txt.)

• Added margin settings for the input window

• Added 'null spawn': if a spawn has an empty window title, it starts a spawn capture to the main window (useful to stop other spawns between two match texts) -- (very useful for that. Now I can keep things in help files and bb posts from setting off my spawn triggers!)

• Fixed bug where docked windows in a new tab don't re-layout properly until closing and reopening tab

• Fixed bug where output windows don't update with new content when an OS dialog is up (file picker, font picker, color picker, etc..)

• Fixed crash when resizing from tiny window size on boot (not sure how it can get into that state though)

• Fixed crash in maps when creating zero sized rooms

• Fixed crash in maps when trying to speedrun without a current room

• Fixed hang when using 'log from beginning' on a full output window

As usual the preferred mode of grabbing it is the Microsoft Store, but it's also available from github! The Discord server is still a great place to go for general questions, trigger help, suggestions, or anything else related, too.

@Rinel said in A Lack of Imagination:

Now I'm curious. I realize there are confounding factors here, but do any of you who don't do the picture thing enjoy the building aspects of games like Minecraft?

Absolutely. The main things I did in Minecraft were the puzzle-y bits (basically figuring out how to automate All The Things and what should go where to be efficient and the like) and all the building. ALL the building. The people I played with would go off and explore and kill things and collect stuff and, well, mine, and I would mine some as well, but mostly I designed and built our places. (And did a lot of sorting and managing our resources because come ON people, if you just throw everything into any chest we will never find it again, and then we might as well not even have it.)

@Kanye-Qwest said in A Lack of Imagination:

Sometimes I get held up because I'm like wait but they were right HERE and now they are posing being THERE and arms don't work like that!!!1 And I realize it's my deal and I don't push it on other people but it slows my poses down as I adjust and try to figure out how to describe plausible animation I see happening.

I have this issue too, but again, no visual component to it. I just know X can't be here AND there at once, and I could swear A was between B and C so how is she now leaning on D, who I'm pretty sure was seated on the other side of the table? Sometimes I annoy people by trying to get OOC clarification of just who is sitting where and the like, but I need to know or I don't know where my character is and thus what movements or direct interactions are logical.

I could draw the relevant bits out for you as long as people haven't made them all non-Euclidian, I could gesture around myself to where other people are if I'm where my character is, but if I close my eyes and try to see it, all I get is black. And maybe afterimages of whatever light was in the RL room.

I'm really confused where anyone is getting 'outrage' from the posts in this thread. The closest thing to it I saw is @ixokai's discomfort with what feels to him like creepy fetishization of a group to which he belongs (which I, at least, think is a totally reasonable reaction) and even that wasn't even in the same area code as what I consider 'outrage'.

Honestly, I don't think I saw a single criticism of this game that I'd rate much higher than 'eyerolling'.

@tek This itself, IMO, illustrates one of the issues with starting up: different game cultures. I haven't been on a game in years where there wasn't an expectation that a scene was strict-pose-order unless 3per had been declared (though some places it's assumed in whatever is there considered a 'really large' scene), but 2 and 3 have varied wildly, from games (and people) that loved running OOC commentary and jokes and out-of-scene chatting to ones where almost no one did OOC during scenes unless it was establishing something important to IC (or saying 'my kitchen is on fire, afk'), and from places and people where every individual is expected to get a nod all the time to ones where the prevailing unspoken (these things are so often unspoken) opinion is that that's silly and real people don't do that.

I wrote a few intro to MU*ing/rules for MU* RP essays in ye olden days when I was pretty sure I knew the Right Way, but I think the rules and expectations that are genuinely close to MU*-universal in not only existence but magnitude are not that many.

Wow. I've been even more remiss this time. WELL. Come one, come all, to version 307! Here's what's new/fixed/updated since my last update here:

4.00.301 - 2020-9-30

• Added actions to the trigger debugger, so much easier to see what's happening when
• Added right click menu option to easily create/select a trigger on a word/selection of text in the output/spawn windows
• Added right click menu in trigger & network debugger windows (to pause/split/clear them easily)
• Improved consistency of right click menus for text windows (& spawn windows)
• Fixed a bug with hash coloring in triggers when applied to the whole line
• Fixed a minor bug with pause handling in all windows, hopefully I didn't cause another
• Fixed crash with using '/delay kill' and not passing a timer ID

4.00.302 - 2021-3-9

• Added support for jpeg rotation property, so images won't appear rotated/flipped in the image viewer
• Added regex capture index for send trigger actions
• Added Hash coloring to Paragraph trigger actions, plus made background hash coloring use 50% brightness
• Added global 'exit text color' option for maps
• Changed tilemaps to be a GMCP protocol: beip.tilemap
• Changed some build options, changed PCRE to be compiled for speed (~8% perf boost locally) slightly bigger .exe (improves boot perf with large restore logs & lots of triggers)
• Changed /receive to be more useful during trigger processing, it now gets passed directly to the trigger code (vs reentering the line buffer code incorrectly)
• Changed /connect & /world commands to not give an error if the tab is already connected as the error had no use, new tabs would be opened anyways.
• Removed the confusing 'Connect without creating a server' pane
• Improved Pueblo support, now waits for "</xch_mudtext>" before interpreting incoming text as Pueblo tags
• Fixed a map bug where per room text colors weren't being saved
• Fixed a hang on shutdown due to WM_ENDSESSION being handled by the wrong window
• Fixed live spell-check, and tab-complete so it's possible to use under Wine on Unix (needs a separate spelling DLL, but it now works) - sponsored by The Order of Her Noodly Appendage
• Fixed a crash when a mu* sends a new prompt while the user is selecting the last line of text in the output window.
• Fixed a bug where while selecting text in the top pane of a split window, and the window is unsplit by the middle mouse button while over the splitter, the window gets stuck paused and can't be unpaused
• Fixed a bug where Logging->'Starting from top of window...' wouldn't work properly as the 'Logging started' message would scroll the window to the bottom and start at that new top.

4.00.303 - 2021-3-10

• Fixed a hang on telnet charset (thank you Reflexwolf!)

4.00.304 - 2021-3-17

• Fixed twitchy text scrolling when showing MUD prompts
• Added 'Delete Line' in output text windows, delete things you don't want to see! (Note: Not removed from logs)
• Added workaround for servers that lie about the charset they support (Server option, 'Limit CHARSET negotation to chosen encoding')
• Tweaked docked window dragging to require some drag movement before dragging starts (previously dragged instantly, causing issues)
• Fixed a crash/hang on Logging/'Start from Beginning'/'Start from top of Window' if the window is empty
• Fixed TCP_KEEPALIVE, broke it in 302 when shuffling around some code. Apparently Keepalive can only be set after connecting, not before.
• Remember the window size even if aero-snapped so that docked windows don't shrink on restart

4.00.305 - 2021-4-27

• Added inline images! (optional of course, can configure it in the Options->Preferences... dialog)
• Added ability to click on pause icon to unpause if it was paused by the user (vs paused by an action like find requiring it to stay paused)
• Added 'Thesaurus.com' lookup on right click of word in input window (if it's spelled correctly)
• Added 'Reconnect' keyboard shortcut
• Added idle message sending to the character settings, no need to use /idle anymore
• Changed the alias dialog to show a multiline test result
• Fixed the output window getting stuck paused if you left click on multiple input devices at once (like mouse & touchpad for example).

4.00.306 - 2021-4-28

• Fixed a crashing bug for certain items in the right click menu (had a bug in the new structure to hold the menu items)

4.00.307 - 2021-5-19

• Made .gifv links be treated as .gif and will now show up and animate for inline images
• Made image URLs with ? in them work, like http://example.com/image.jpg?width=100&height=100
• Extended /delay times to allow fractional values, so /delay 2.2s ... /delay 1.5m ... etc now works
• Improved HTML logging to handle paragraph styles, toggle-able time stamps and formatting!
• Changed inline images to decode on a background thread vs the UI thread, should be a little smoother
• Fixed a weird inline image redraw bug with webp -- apparently webp pumps window messages during decoding. Fixed by the previous item
• Fixed Pueblo glitch where an image URL could show two inline images, due to auto URL parsing running on top of the Pueblo URL
• Fixed some windows shutdown related bugs (and app update), it would previously not save settings if a windows shutdown was previously aborted
• Fixed a bug where timers stop working randomly (all app timers, so even tooltips)
• Fixed a redraw bug with inline images, the top margin wasn't being accounted for properly
• Fixed a crash on images where it thinks an image is an animated gif but isn't

As always, if you don't have it or it hasn't updated itself yet, you can grab the current version from the Microsoft Store (preferred), or alternatively from the github. Come by the Discord and say hi or thank you or ask any questions you have about features you like or want or about setting up unreasonably complicated triggers!

There's a cat curled up like a danish snoring next to me.

I love a good playlist. Do I listen to everyone's? Not even close. But I look at the lists most of the time, and sometimes think about what they suggest about the character, and if I like a character and I'm not busy (I only have certain circumstances under which I can really listen), I'll actually play the list. There's been a couple that I absolutely loved, even if I didn't love all the songs, because they seemed so well-put-together and apropos.

I also wonder sometimes whether people ever look at my playlists. Sometimes I pick songs for nonobvious reasons, and sometimes I'll let things show in the music that doesn't in the other information. I wonder at times if anyone ever notices those things. But I do make them mostly for myself, because it's easier for me to stay in the right character's head if I'm listening to the right playlist.

Woke up the other day with a potential solution to a code problem that I'd abandoned in favour of other things several weeks ago, and it's worked.

@sunny Huh! I think that'd feel really odd to me. Even though I don't do a lot of grid-walking (I tend to teleport, on any kind of game that lets me) I like having a grid, and walking it at least a few times. It gives me a better feeling for how things are linked up -- that and maps, though ideally both -- which I inevitably need at some point when I have to figure out whether X is a block from Y or all the way across town, or similar. I guess I could probably work with a good, detailed map if there wasn't a grid, as long as things still had descs, but it'd still feel... just weird to me not to have a grid.