Best posts made by Reason

Honestly, even with 20+ years of MU* softcode experience, coding in Evennia (python) is massively more approachable.

For one thing, determining functionality after coming back to your code after a cold month isn't physically painful.

For another thing, determining functionality after coming back to someone else's code after a cold month isn't like stretching the entrails of a rat over a large basin of steaming water (with soft chanting).

I think anyone considering starting a MU* today (that was planning on softcoding the whole thing rather than hacking c) should seriously consider it.

@popes I mean, yeah. The time is now. Wu-Tang is for the children and Python is for everybody.

@faraday said in Games:

I mean, you can put in the + or @ if you want. Ares doesn't care. @desc, +desc and just desc are all the same command.

Sure. And no doubt that's configurable under the hood somewhere.

Old habits die hard. When I discovered that Evennia was similarly clipping my special characters, I had to drop everything to go find the damn config file responsible for removing those leading characters from the command parser and disable that feature.

Wouldn't want @desc to get mixed up with +desc or desc, afterall!

@seraphim73 said in Games:

@reason Just wanted to note that most games that run on Ares //do// have a grid. No, you can't walk it from the web portal (unless you use the integrated client), but you can certainly walk it from your client. Can't help you with the slew of arcane commands that start with @ and + -- when I first started with Ares I typed them by pure muscle memory, and it's taken me a couple of years to not type them instinctively.

Ahhh. Cool. As I said, I haven't scratched too deeply at Ares games. It's mostly been impressed on me that Ares allows for A) easy to ship a game concept, B) web-based asynchronous, gridless gameplay. (I don't think I've actually played on a MUSH since, like, 2008).

To be fair, I don't have strong negative feelings one way or the other from a playability standpoint. I'm somewhat ambivalent there. My issue is more focused on coder side of the equation, and having preferences in that regard that lie elsewhere.

-r

I wonder if this new CD Projekt Cyberpunk 2077 game will motivate one of us enough to code a cyberpunk game that isn't Denver.

A moment ago I revisited a fleeting split second of internet innocence.

It was refreshing, if brief.

I discovered this thread after poking around (admissions of an infrequent lurker), read the first page with optimism, and then skipped to the last page to see where it wound up.

As mentioned; brief.

@derp said in Games:

Dare I even ask why you'd have three versions of a desc command that presumably have different enough functions that a prefix would matter?

Ha -- I don't actually, was mostly kidding.

-r

@reason said in Interest in Cyberpunk MU*?:

Then have to decide if I host this somewhere and attempt to collaborate with a crew on running a game, or just release this code into the wild to exhibit a life of its own.

Which to be clear doesn't actually have to be an either/or, and could in fact be both -- there's something appealingly true to the subject material to release code into the wild to take on a life of its own.

-re: 50n

So, I actually had a semi-functional SR 5 chargen system for an SR 5 MU implemented in Evennia. And by 'semi-functional' I mean, complete hack job of silly code that I swore I'd come back to clean up sometime once I had a better grasp of how Evennia handled things.

I've got to be honest, the more I read the SR 5 Matrix rules the less motivated I was to actually finish coding an SR 5 game -- have you guys actually played a table top of SR 5?

-r

@faraday said in Games:

@reason said in Games:

Sure. And no doubt that's configurable under the hood somewhere.

No. Ares commands have no prefix by design (because as @Derp pointed out, it's kinda silly to have multiple versions of the same command.) The parser just ignores it if you type + or @.

@reason said in Games:

It's mostly been impressed on me that Ares allows for A) easy to ship a game concept, B) web-based asynchronous, gridless gameplay.

A is correct, B is not. Ares is a MUSH, and has a grid and client-based commands same as Penn/Tiny. It just ALSO has a web portal, temproom RP, and asynchronous RP support. Ares just gives people options. What seems to bother people the most is that players are using those options to play in different ways than they want to.

So only configurable in a sense of the word that includes hacking apart the parser. Cool. And appreciate the clarification on grid vs. asynch support.

As I said, I don't really have a dog in this fight and improving accessibility and modernizing access are both positive. My only final reservation largely boils down to a chocolate vs. vanilla preference of implementation language, which is much more about creating than playing.

-r

@prototart said in Interest in Cyberpunk MU*?:

i didn’t read any of this and im drunk but can i play judy

You'd have to settle for a PC roughly inspired by Judy, as CP:Red doesn't take place in 2077 -- it takes place about 30 years earlier.

Also:

+sheet code and +roll code are probably good enough to launch with. Going to refactor chargen a little, based on the way +sheets finally landed. Then it's time to build a grid...

-reason

The free time turned out to be a lie. So much for that.

-r

@faraday said in What's So Hard About Ruby?:

It's also important to keep in mind that when learning to code for the newer MU platforms like Ares or Evennia, you're not just learning Ruby/Python. You're also learning the MUSH-specific classes and the "Ares/Evennia" way of doing things.

Super true. General language comprehension is a prereq for the next phase: The wild, wacky, and hairball task of figuring how a thing built in that language works/behaves.

Which tends to make one grateful for good documentation!

-r

@runescryer said in Dabbling, Mastery, Dunning–Kruger etc:

We have more information freely available to humanity than ever before. But it's just as important that we know how to understand the information presented to us. How to separate out the facts from the opinions that are presented as 'facts'.

This is substantially true. Additionally, the opportunity to be presented with opposing views that challenge of own are increasingly more difficult to come across -- ranging from the communities we live in, work in, subscribe into, etc.

Increasingly we encounter strawmen caricatures of actual opposing viewpoints, which acts to our disservice -- we lose the ability to rationally engage with opposition, and fail to correct the parts of our own foundational understandings that require refinement because they are, at best incomplete, at worst... worse.

-r

For those of you that have successfully launched a game (or feel you've been close enough to launch to have gotten good instincts on the topic):

What are the essential pieces that must be in place to launch successfully? Is there a critical mass of initial staffers? Critical mass of initial players? An existing metaplot ready for day 1? Some game systems which aren't just nice to have, they're absolutely essential? Clear guidance on theme? Clear standards/policies of MU* conduct?

Assume that the bare essentials are already in place -- full-time code support + automated chargen + sheet + roll code.

Would love some opinions on this.

Thanks!

-reason

@krmbm said in What's So Hard About Ruby?:

My brain-juice gets used for RPing instead of learning to code. I'll stay up late to finish a really good scene, but I'm way too mature nowadays to stay up all night coding. That's for geeks.

Ha! That hurts... because... it's true...

@arkandel said in What's So Hard About Ruby?:

@krmbm said in What's So Hard About Ruby?:

It's probably out of this thread's scope but that's one of the main causes professional developers eventually divert from their original career paths. SNIP

#facts

This is how some of us find our weapon of choice is interpersonal relationships, powerpoint, confluence, and periodically pointing out that the proposal is probably NP Hard as opposed to living in past lives of reflected DLLs, ROP chains, and reverse shells.

-r

@krmbm said in How to launch a MU*:

@wizz Just on the flipside of this: Some people (hi!) actively avoid the "sim" games.

Which brings us back to: build what you would enjoy. Not what you think other MUSHers will. We can't agree on a goddamn thing around here.

I think that's generally sound advice!

I also fully admit that I haven't played on a MUSH for 10+ years, so my instincts on how the genre has evolved aren't as finely tuned as they once were, and building on top of the innovations of the present rather than strictly recalling my preferences of the past is something I'd like to be sensitive to.

For example, I'm still trying to fully grok SceneSys and it's implications -- that's new and novel (at least by my standards).

@Derp I would have to respectfully disagree with your characteristic of MU* code being open to anyone who wants to learn. MU* code is open to anyone who wants to search archaic remnants of an age long since past, and invoke an animal spirit code guide with a mix of peyote and pleasant page-chats.

Which isn't to diminish the importance or joy or learning MU* code anymore than the importance or joy of learning Haskell (or really any functional programming paradigm, for that matter) -- just that hanging your hold-ups on the accessibility of MU* code is odd when it is 1) Not actually accessible afterall 2) Less accessible than a number of modern languages (by orders of magnitude), including the direct contrast of Evennia's Python.

My own concerns are much closer to the challenges of changing creatures of habit.

We of the MU* like our MU*ness to be of a certain character.

Evennia is a foreigner in that regard, who exhibits the capacity to over time learn our languages and holy customs, but has not yet made a pilgrimage to the shrine of... whatever soft-code gods we hold dearest.

That said, it is exciting -- I feel that it is a step in the right direction, for both the sustainability of the hobby with respect to code support (I will probably never write another line of MU* soft-code so long as I live. Maybe. Okay, probably maybe.), as well with respect to the accessibility of new players (Native web client vs. reskinned 1970s Telnet).

@Derp said:

Which... doesn't mean that it isn't open to anyone who wants to learn, that just means that it's something that they'll have to put some actual work into, and maybe seek a mentor. Much like anything else anyone could ever hope to learn. But all of the documentation for it is included in the help files, along with examples and such, and outside of a few concepts which are rather buried, you need not ever really seek an outside mentor. It's all self-contained. But more importantly, it can be used within the game itself without having to worry overly much about server access. Ergo, open to anyone who wants to learn.

Except that any MU user can create their own softcode to do specific things they want it to do that might not be important enough to implement game-wide, and they can do so without having to worry about server access, etc. Anything that could super easily break things is largely denied due to permissions. The same cannot be said of Evennia. It might not be something that a great many users ever pursue, but it's something that I find important enough to dissuade me from looking into Evennia.

You've mentioned server access twice. You understand that "server access" in Evennia's case means a desktop, 2 minutes spent downloading a Python distribution, and a pulse. Right?

There are literally thousands of hours of youtube videos explaining how Python works. There's absolutely no comparison. MU* softcode is as approachable as a purple, pulsating vomitorium.

I appreciate your interest in softcode, mind you. I think that the world would be a better place if more people took a moment to think about functional programming. W.W.H.D., that's my moto.

But it just isn't tenable to hold up 'accessibility of code resources' as the primary thing holding MU* softcode at the forefront of text based online game dominance.

@greenflashlight said in Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff:

That mutation has bred true 100% of the time ever since, so we may safely conclude no future generations shall have people named Bianca, either.

As a time traveler from the future, can confirm this is correct.

As far as weird/unrealistic gaming stuff, I hate how characters in d20-based worlds mature and grow their skills to increase success in 5% increments. Linear probability is garbage, and game systems that adopt it should be ashamed of themselves.

-r

Anyone have any experience with the 'Corporation' RPG system by Brutal Games?

Cyberpunk has always been a guilty pleasure, but its so hard to get it without floofy elves.

-r