@thenomain said in Questions About Evennia:
@rnmissionrun said in Questions About Evennia:
More documentation can only help.
Said someone who apparently hasn’t had to make sense of Arx’s files.
I have not. Arx is a fine game I'm sure, and I'm intrigued that it uses Evennia. It's just not my kind of game.
@griatch said in Questions About Evennia:
What would be nice to have would be a "Evennia for MUSH users" actually written by a MUSH user who also knows Evennia to go into the Evennia for <Engine>-users category of our tutorials. I contributed a small article (which first appeared on here) but it is only very broad and I'm not musher to begin with. Alas, no musher has actually stepped up to that challenge (and I've asked about it for years in our forums). It's not just mush-coders for sure; people with experience in other engines seems just as unwilling to write comparisons it seems.
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Griatch
It's not that I unwilling to write such a document, it's just that Evennia is so different from MUSH that I wouldn't even know where to start. It would be like trying to write a "Operating a dump truck guide" for bicyclists. Sure there are superficial similarities between those two things-- they're both vehicles with tires, for example, but the differences are orders of magnitude apart.
If you're an experienced MUSHer interested in learning Evennia, I suggest that first, you get yourself a good Python tutorial and learn the basics of the language. Remember, Evennia is 100% Python, you will need to know it and knowing it beforehand will help you make sense of things when you start tinkering with the actual server. Once you're a little familiar with Python, install Evennia and start tinkering. If you have questions, join the IRC or, in the event that you're turned off by the MUD-centric nature of most of the IRC chatter, find a game in the Evennia Games Index and try asking for help there. I'm always happy to answer questions on my site (The Big Empty) and Tirit is also (Deep Shadows).
There's a Mage game, it's not Volund's though. You can find it on the Evennia Game Index, here.
@nyctophiliac said in Questions About Evennia:
So I've got questions about Evennia that maybe some people around here could answer without me bugging the poor people on the discord/irc server that are probably tired of me bugging them.
How customizable is the system? Like say for instance I wanted to run an nWoD 2.0 game (>_>), is it feasible? Is the current release stable enough for my coder to tinker around with tweaking this?
Wiki! I've been looking at the games hosted, and they all have wikis that seem similar in design. Is this powered by a 3rd party wiki something akin to mediawiki? Or was it hand coded to suit Evennia?
I could have sworn there was a module/feature list that I just cannot find again - am I mistaken? Can someone point me in the right direction? (Examples: bboard, paging, battle system, etc).
Thank you in advance.
It's very customizable, but of course non-trivial things will require some skill to accomplish.
Not sure what you mean by this, are you talking about the main Evennia wiki?
The core system is functional but still pretty light since it's meant to be an extensible framework and not a MU*-in-a-box type of thing. There's no mail system, boards system , no concept of object "ownership" in the traditional sense, characters don't even have genders, etc. There are numerous contributed modules that make up for some of these, you can find those here.
Learn django and improve my Python skills so I can do more amazing things with Evennia.
Stop procrastinating and attempt to open a game of some kind.
@ganymede said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:
Okay.
Dare I ask -- what about Blade Runner: The Darkening?
You know, cyberpunk dystopia, corporate city-states, and replicants trying to round up meta-humans to sterilize or kill them.
Good place to start?
Damn.
Now I gotta go change my pants.
Another example of a web based chargen for an Evennia game. Not sure how complete it is.
@sparks said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@sparks said in Alternative Formats to MU:
A list of people presently online on the game, where you can click on one and have it open a private messaging conversation to them, is arguably a lot more intuitive to everyone who uses the internet than knowing you need to 'page <blah>=<foo>'. Everyone's used to being able to do that on Discord servers already, or Battle.net, or Steam, or Skype, or IRC, or whatever.
I am 99% sure that that feature alone would make these games immediately accessible to a wider audience. Clickable tool bar to bring up a collapsible who list/friends (watch) list, clickable conversations, and so on.
Heck, I think (as I'm sure everyone on this board is painfully aware by now) that even just putting your bboards on the website is a huge leap forward in usability; you can then read boards without logging in, you can read them without cluttering up your scene / logfile, etc. That's a UI change which immediately benefits even existing, experienced MU* users.
It's why the first thing I wrote for my Evennia game-in-a-box kit was a web-enabled forum system.
Yep, we have your forum on the game. It works great, but it's mainly a convenience for mobile users.
@surreality said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@rnmissionrun I dunno about that one. A lot more people tinker with graphics than tinker with Python, I'd think. This is not to say that a lot of people are necessarily any good at it, but most of that's a matter of taste anyway.
Maybe, but overcoming 20 years of inertia is going to take more effort than I'm willing to expend at this point.
I'll reconsider my position when I start seeing more games with web based UIs.
@meg said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@rnmissionrun not if it was already part of the platform and all you had to do was change some configuration options.
My current project uses Evennia, so there is support for it. I just never planned to do anything with it.
I am not opposed to the idea of a web interface on principle (by which I mean UI, not just rendering text in a browser window).
My very first game was started in 1997. Pueblo was a brand new thing, the notion of having graphics, sound, clickable links and all was super exciting to us and so we moved to implement it on our game.That's when we discovered that we were writers, not graphic artists and since none of us were that interested in developing those skills, we decided to ignore the web. This was the right decision at the time since it turned out that pretty much everyone else did, too.
This is my main problem with the web interface. If you lack the skills for it yourself, you're going to have to find someone else that can do it, and these days, even finding a coder or builders can seem an impossible task. It doesn't matter that there are millions of skilled web developers out there (any more than it matters that there are millions of skilled Python developers, if your game is written in Python), finding one willing to work on your game (for free) is going to take a miracle.
I'm pretty sure that Arx's success has nothing to do with the fact that it's an Evennia based game. I think it's more because of the people running it, the setting, and the fact that it's just a really well put together game
@rook said in Alternative Formats to MU:
I personally have seen more people walk away from their first time MUSHing for reasons
having to do with the complexity of the RPG being used (I'm looking at you, WoD) or because
of the interpersonal interactions had on the game itself with the Staff/Players, than I have ever > seen leave because of "all that typing".
I often talk about MUSHing with the folks in my LoTRO RP Kin and the number one reason I hear from people who tried MUSHing but didn't like it is, they couldn't figure out what they were supposed to do and were afraid to ask because they didn't want people to think they were stupid.
@roz said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@rnmissionrun said in Alternative Formats to MU:
Yup, that's the overall attitude that makes the hobby generally unwelcoming to outsiders who might be interested in giving it a try.
If that's true, then labeling the very reasonable expectation that people learn to use the tools that are required by the venue in order to use it effectively (or at all), is another.
I honestly don't think that the requirement to download and install an app in order to play on a MUSH is an issue at all. Millions of smartphone users understand the concept of "you need an app for that", as do most computer users.
The issue of people not wanting to type complicated commands, well that's a little different, but I look at it like this. You're communicating with others in a text-only medium. You're using words to convey visual information, emotion, sounds, moods. If you can handle all that, but are stymied by the syntax for the command to make a bbpost, then you're probably in the wrong hobby.
@griatch said in Alternative Formats to MU:
Did you notice the question I posed to you a little earlier in this thread? It got lost just at the end of a page. As you are an Evennia dev I'd be interested in your elaboration on that one. If not that's cool, just not sure if you just missed it.
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Griatch
I did miss it but I won't answer here so as to avoid derailing the thread even further.
@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:
How many MUSHcode experts are out there? A dozen? There are tens - maybe hundreds - of thousands of Python/Ruby experts. You're FAR more likely to be able to find a programmer pal who knows one of these languages, or someone who's willing to learn.
If you're unwilling to use the out-of-box functionality, unwilling to learn to code, and unable to find a coder, then I can't help you. Nobody can.
What I can do is make it so that some percentage of games can be created with zero code (where presently even just setting the dang thing up is a technical hurdle, let alone customizing anything) and make it far easier to learn to code. The latter should, in theory, also make it easier to find a coder.
It may be that you are right and I am just old, set in my ways and resistant to change. My opinions come mainly from twenty year's worth of trying-- with very very little success, mind you-- to get MU*ers to play on non-MUSH games. The population of Arx suggests that maybe times have changed and people are open to new ideas. Time will tell.
@roz said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@rnmissionrun said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@meg said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@rnmissionrun said in Alternative Formats to MU:
I honestly do not think that simply moving from MUSHcode to Python (or Ruby) will make it 'orders of magnitude' easier. Sure, it might help some folks, but IMO if you don't have the aptitude for coding, simply switching languages isn't going to make any difference. The problem is that doing anything non-trivial in /any/ programming language requires real skill. Non-coders probably won't have those skills, or be interested in developing them.
Lol. I once showed a real coder (a man who has worked as a systems architect in C, C++, and C# and node.js and all kinds of languages for 20+ years) some MUSH code and he stared at it in horror and couldn't figure it out.
He could probably learn Python in a day.
And that's an /experienced coder/ learning. Not an inexperienced one.
That was my first reaction too, but I stuck with it and eventually figured it out
My point was that simply switching languages wasn't going to help people who weren't interested in learning a programming language or who lack the aptitude for coding.
No, but it will make it a whole lot easier for folks who are inclined to try out learning a bit of code. Like, the idea that changing to an easier and more powerful programming language with tons more resources to learn in the world somehow will have no effect on anything is just -- weird.
Yes, people who don't want to try ever learning code will continue to not try to learn code. That will be the case no matter what.
Yep, I'm totally on board with that. I've been tinkering with Evennia for a few months now and I find Python to be a very agreeable language to work with. I just don't see people abandoning MUSH for it.
@meg said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@rnmissionrun said in Alternative Formats to MU:
I honestly do not think that simply moving from MUSHcode to Python (or Ruby) will make it 'orders of magnitude' easier. Sure, it might help some folks, but IMO if you don't have the aptitude for coding, simply switching languages isn't going to make any difference. The problem is that doing anything non-trivial in /any/ programming language requires real skill. Non-coders probably won't have those skills, or be interested in developing them.
Lol. I once showed a real coder (a man who has worked as a systems architect in C, C++, and C# and node.js and all kinds of languages for 20+ years) some MUSH code and he stared at it in horror and couldn't figure it out.
He could probably learn Python in a day.
And that's an /experienced coder/ learning. Not an inexperienced one.
That was my first reaction too, but I stuck with it and eventually figured it out 
My point was that simply switching languages wasn't going to help people who weren't interested in learning a programming language or who lack the aptitude for coding.
