Posts made by Ninjakitten

New update! 4.00.286 is up on the store and should update next time you restart your client, or it's up on the github if you prefer working that way. The biggest new thing is a way to view images within the client, and there's a number of little fixes.

• Added a dockable image viewer window that downloads and displays the last image URLs seen in the output
  Note: By default, the dockable image viewer will automatically appear when the first image link arrives, but it can be disabled in options: Options > Preferences > Untick "Show image viewer"

• Added restore of minimized/maximized state of every window (also fixes a bug where panes shrink gradually if you closed it while maximized)

• Fixed regression from build 285 where new windows would always have two tabs

• Fixed annoyance where if you connect from a connect dialog, a reconnected tab in a different window won't get the focus

• Fixed a bug where puppets would prevent window configurations from being saved to their characters (the puppet one would overwrite it then be ignored)

• Fixed annoyance where if you restore a configuration from another computer and any of the windows/panes are off screen, they are moved to the primary monitor

• Improved hyperlink parsing so that a ')' at the end is included if there's an unmatched '(' before it (doesn't handle nested ('s though)

• Improved Log filename %server%/%character% substitutions to allow multiple substitutions of each

Gonna put in a quick plug for the Discord group, too. Good for finding help and answers to questions, and also for making suggestions of your own!

@Wretched ...also, figured I'd mention BeipMU has spellcheck, if you ever decide you want a client that's not abandoned.

@Wretched ...I was going to say definitely not in my case, but... well, I do have to know part of what my character is going to do or say or have something specific that amuses me metawise to respond to part of things or I can't get started. But... beyond that, I often don't know where else it's going until it does. And I very definitely do the cut-and-paste frankenstein pose writing thing. Often the thing I started with ends up in the middle, or I get hit with what the end of the pose should be before I've written most of what comes in between... I usually have a blank file open in notepad++ to paste bits that get cut from a pose into so I can (I hope) use them in the next pose or later in the scene because they didn't really fit right in the one I wrote them in.

Sometimes I also get lost between paragraphs and have to go reread various parts of poses, or I have to go look up synonyms because I know what I want to say but the right word won't come on its own and my brain refuses to use the similar-but-not-right one.

I'm good on the spelling and (mostly) the proofreading and usually catch the redundancies, though. I'm also a pretty slow writer/poser. This fact is not unrelated to any of the rest of this post.

@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.

@Taika What do you want the timer to do? If it's just an idle timer, then you do /idle 15 "@@" or similar, and anytime you're idle 15 minutes (not just every 15 minutes, but when you actually haven't sent anything) it'll send @@. You can type the command in when you want it to start, or you can throw it into a connection's Connect String to have it do it every time you connect.

Yes. Yes please. I need to figure out how I'd find more time and who/what I'd want to be but if there's a Discworld game I will be there.

Even with the 'people though' worries.

Been a while since the last release, but for good reason: this update is huge. 4.00.285: Total Recall Edition!

• Spawns, input windows, and input history now have their layouts and content restored per character (and on exit/reopen)
• Bonus: If there's a crash, the content will be restored up to the moment of the crash!
• Changed the welcome text into a popup window, since it doesn't fit anywhere in the restored content
• Added a tooltip for the window tabs, so if they're truncated it's still possible to see the full name, unread count, etc.
• Added 'Convert spaces to %B' function
• Added '/autolog' to restart any stopped server/character autolog
• Added '/reconnect' to reconnect to all disconnected tabs in every window
• Added 'File->Close Window' to close a single window
• Changed 'File->Exit' to close all windows (so that relaunching will then restore all windows vs just the last one closed)
• Added '/exit' to close all windows and their tabs (same as File->Exit)
• Added %server% and %character% variable substitution for all log filenames
• Added right click menu for URLs (open/copy)
• Added support for Pueblo tags
• Added Tab number display when Alt is pressed (for easy Alt+# switching)
• Changed it so that the config.txt file is locked on open, so you can't open two copies that try to write to the same file accidentally
• Changed '/wall ' to act like it was directly typed in every connected world, so aliases & commands all work
• Changed input history color to be the window color, not the inaccessible local echo color
• Changed TCP_NODELAY to be on by default since BeipMU already internally coalesces sent data into single blocks optimally
• Fixed minor annoyance where clicking on a spawn window in the background wouldn't bring it's main window to the front
• Fixed a crash when trying to connect with SSL and the port isn't the SSL one (basically when SSL fails to negotiate)
• Improved tooltips so that they don't go off the right or bottom edges of the working area of the monitor they appear on

That first change is the really massive one and it's great. Not only does it remember your layout now, but you can also copy a layout from one character and paste it to another, and as long as you're using the same names for the spawns you're triggering you can easily make them match up!

If you're using the version from the Windows Store it should update itself next time you restart, and from then on, every time you reopen the program it'll remember your layouts and show the last content from your worlds (unless you tell it not to, which you can).

If you're not, you can get the new version here, but please consider using the Store version because it sends the dev reports if something goes wrong (and you've opted into the extended Windows telemetry), which helps him find rare bugs, and it also gives him a better idea of how many people are actually using it, which is motivating. And everyone loves a motivated dev!

@krmbm said in OOC Knowledge Levels Question:

You get a little reminder to download them if they're going to time-out

That's a thing I'd wondered about! Does it send you a mail or something?

@Atomic The attention of your cats?

@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!

@surreality Honestly, if it's a matter of people paging me when I'm busy with other stuff, especially when I've already said? I'd code myself a command to set a @lock/page against everyone and a polite explanatory @reject, either as a toggle or with a second one to remove them. +mute/+unmute, maybe. It takes a lot more work to violate a boundary if code's enforcing it for me. Plus at that point it becomes an issue for staff, anyway. If I generally left channels then too, I'd add that in also, just to save myself some keystrokes.

...okay, so it only shows up for Open scenes, not private ones, even if it's your private scene, looks like? But on my tests it didn't show up anywhere I could find on the Active Scenes page regardless, which I'm almost positive more people use to look for one. I saw the post way too late to be able to check Auspice's.

@krmbm I know you can do it with a temproom, I guess I didn't make that clear. Or you missed it, but I missed that you meant making it an option in the sense of /announce (didn't spot that after the =), as opposed to an option like 'to be enabled or not by a game', so you know, fair enough!

@faraday said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@Ninjakitten said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

The one thing that leaps to mind here is that you don't seem to be able to scene/start privately in the room you're actually in, which makes sense in a Cafe but is a little weird in your apartment.

You should be able to. It gives you a little warning about occupying a grid room with a private scene, but you can safely ignore that if it's your own private apartment. Perhaps the wording on the warning needs some work.

I can scene/start in the room, but (at least according to help) scene/start [<area>/]<location name>=<private/open> starts a scene in a temp room, and for your current grid room, it's just scene/start -- so it starts open, and thus would be making an announcement as a new open scene, in the suggested situation, but would probably get made private almost instantly in many cases. I kind of figured this was an intentional choice so that it was harder to make a grid-scene private and anyone doing so would definitely get the warning.

Anyway, I was just saying that if open-scene-creation announced to RP Requests, the on-grid in-home scenes would get announced, and that seemed suboptimal.

I'm also not sure what the concern is about ending up with an abandoned scene in your unshared list. If it bugs you, you can delete it. Or re-use it for the next day and change the description. They'll get auto cleaned up eventually if not shared.

I know they auto-cleanup eventually. I don't know why just deleting it feels odd to me. I think it might be because it creates gaps in the scene numbering and makes the number rise faster. Which is silly. Especially as that happens anyway and even I don't follow whether every number shows up. But sometimes I have some silly issues. >_> That one's probably just me.

Summary is supposed to show up on public scenes. If it isn't, that's a bug and I'll look into it.

I might be looking wrong! ...that said, I usually find that kind of thing pretty intuitive and am often the person answering other people's questions on games, so if I am looking wrong, it might still be a thing that needed to be clearer.

Here's my issue with using the scenes system as a want-rp thing: I really hate ending up with abandoned scenes hanging out in my unshared, and the chances of any given speculative scene going unused seem high. I mean, I guess one could keep reusing the same one if it doesn't get used? Just change the summary and date and location? But I don't think people will.

I also don't see where the summary actually shows up while a scene is in progress. Testing one (granted, I'm only on one Ares game), the summary didn't seem to show up either in the Active Scenes list or in the scenes command's list on the game...

@krmbm said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@faraday said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

ETA: However, I did envision the scene system being used for this end.

+scene/start Somewhere in Westeros=open/Looking for RP - maybe down by the dragons? I'm flexible

That shows up both on the web scenes list, the in-game +where, and the in-game scenes list. I don't really know how to advertise any better than that, but I'm all ears if somebody comes up with something.

I think the thing that's missing on this is some sort of announcement about the open scene. Right now, at least on GH (and on SL, when I played there), the trend is to start the scene, then note on the RP channel that you started a scene.

Just spit-balling - If there was some kind of announcement option (e.g., - +scene/start Somewhere in Westeros=announce/Looking for RP - maybe down by the dragons? I'm flexible) that pushed a little "[RP Requests] Bob started an open scene: <Details>" comment...?

The one thing that leaps to mind here is that you don't seem to be able to scene/start privately in the room you're actually in, which makes sense in a Cafe but is a little weird in your apartment. 'Never RP on-grid in your apartment' is an option but also a little weird and more importantly probably not never going to happen. So you'd probably end up with announcements of scenes that go private 10 seconds later.

I've definitely recycled. If a char of mine is in two places with the same name and PB, it's the same character. (And I don't really reuse names or PBs otherwise.)

In one case I played the same character on two oWoD games because one was very verrrrrrry slow at the time and I missed the char and thought it'd be interesting to see how he was and wasn't different on game #2. In that case, he started each game in the same position in his life history, with the same starting stats, etc. It was kind of interesting, but I probably wouldn't try that experiment again.

The other times, I've had a character I really liked, but the story ended way too soon. Usually because the game died. In those cases, I've brought them in again somewhere it felt like they fit, usually keeping their previous history... or a version of it, anyway. All the important beats, tweaked to match the new world where necessary. Any missing time ('I played this char at 19 on a game set in 2012 in actual 2005, he'd be, what, 26 now on this 2019 game?'), I figure out what the char's been up to and what effects it probably had.

I've played 40-50 characters in the last couple decades and I've 'sequeled' 5, I think? 6 if you count a few sandbox scenes after one game imploded. One char took me over a decade to find a spot to actually play after a group app collapsed in the forming stages, so, yeah, I damn well did find somewhere else to give him a go when the first spot I found ended up swiftly dying.

So, clearly, I think there's merit to it. I think it's a little weird if someone always and only plays Bob the Whatever on every game in every genre, but if it makes them happy, okay, just make it fit. If someone was having fun playing Bob on CoolGame and CG dies and SpiffyGame over there is similar enough that Bob could've moved from CoolGame's Los Angeles setting to SpiffyGame's New York, have fun. Just... make it fit.

@Arkandel said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@Cupcake *entitled. People are entitled.

People feel they are entitled.

Given this is a peeves thread, that happens to hit one of mine. People are entitled to various things. The problem is when they feel they are entitled to things they aren't, like 'standing in the middle of the street on their phone because it's a crosswalk'.

I consider this an important distinction because conflating 'entitled' with 'wrongly thinks they are entitled' causes actual genuine trouble when people start talking about 'entitlements' like, for example, (US) Social Security. You are entitled to that if you paid in. You are not 'being entitled' in the slang sense of thinking you should be given special treatment. But it ends up shading the concept that way and that ends up actually harming real people in the end. I know I'll never win against common usage, but it bugs me.

@GangOfDolls AFAIK the Ares side of the website's always been like that. They only wanted people using wikidot (put a www in front of what you used). It's pretty odd.

@Auspice Well, now I feel left out. Woe!

4.00.284!
Added Telnet CHARSET negotiation so UTF-8 encoding is enabled automatically
Added 'Clear spawn' action for spawn triggers
Added 'Gag from Log' action for spawn triggers (so a single spawn or an entire capture can be easily gagged from the log)
Added error display for trigger importing (to explain why it failed vs just 'error')
Changed 'Explorer' dialog into 'Character Statistics', and added a lot of refinements to it
Added 'Connection Count' 'Connected Time' 'Total Bytes' as character statistics
Improved internal time code to avoid connect time wraparounds after 49.7 days
Fixed a glitch where if you change the font, if the time & date column is visible it doesn't resize to match

Smallish changes in this one, but good ones. If anyone has any questions about how to do things or if things can be done, please ask! The discord's really helpful, but I'm willing to try to answer things here, also.