Posts made by Rook

I know that a lot of MU Clients have UI widgets for writing mail, as a for-instance. I don't know of anyone that uses it to actually write mail.

Doesn't invalidate it's usefulness, of course, but maybe we could talk more about changing the conversation here.

Let's talk about how clients should change to make things easier? What features would you demand? What helps people get into it? Help files? More widgets? What would you add.

I'm particularly interested in this branch of the conversation, since I'm toying with building a mu client for myself.

@Roz
Oh, don't get me wrong. I certainly don't think that you're making things up. I just think that MUSH is a niche, always has been. I have talked to lots of gamers that have never touched a MUD, and those are far more prolific than MUSHes.

I just think that the medium is prohibitive to start with and I don't honestly think that it is the UI. It was built by nerds working on command line interfaces all day. Most people don't know what Rogue is, or Angband, or the derivatives.

@Roz
I would wager to say that, of those players that you describe, there are very few of them that are expecting or settling for a text-only medium, to begin with.

"What? No pictures? I'm out!"

This is what I mean to say when I say that UI, the interface itself, does very very little to abstract away from the fact that the game IS typing. JUST TYPING. ALL THE TIME. And you have to type well or the culture will snub you. They will laugh at your grammar, your desc, your LOL speech, all of it.

CULTURE is the biggest barrier to entry to MUSH. Period. I really don't think that anyone can convince me otherwise. After all, this entire board's existence is based purely on culture, culture fit, culture breaches and various lack-thereofs.

@surreality
That does not grok, dear. The mentioned policy was about having a PB that could be Google-image-searched and if the staff found/located nudity in other pictures of that PB, you couldn't use them.

That image doesn't even have to be uploaded to the game's wiki. It is clearly visible on YouPorn.com, therefore you are banned from using that actor!!!11!1

That's Rabid Crazy, right there. Seriously.

Then I would surmise that they would be equally scared to ask for help if they couldn't figure out the web interface widgets.

My point in the conversation is that the medium has a small amount of impact, yes. We all agree. I just don't think that it is a barrier to entry as much as some propose. I don't think that a web interface is a bad idea, I highly encourage it. I want all of the 3 major MUSH codebases (I don't lump Evennia or Ares into MUSH, because they didn't derive from the branch) to continue integrating methods and APIs to integrate with backends for websites. Rhost and Penn are almost there, Ares and Evennia are there. All of them will require more work, more refinement, more features, etc.

But I do NOT think that moving things to the web will resolve the major barriers of entry into MUSH:

1. You have to know and read the source books for most games. You just do.
2. You have to Do Things on the game to construct your character, unless that game makes your character for you and you just log in.
3. You have to Do Things on the game to play, and that includes a lot of rather high-level typing, with grammar and proper spelling and syntax and all that crazy shit that nerds do.

UI is just UI. It doesn't impact Gameplay in MUSH as much as this thread seems to imply.

Consider the UI of such a game where you have a widget for every way to communicate on a MUSH. You would have to have a popup window (or whatever your UI solution is) for:

• Paging
• Posing (including: emote, pose, and say)
• OOC talk
• Places talk (including tt, ttooc, ttpose, et al.)
• BBoards
• IC Phones, Messengers, Missives, and whatever else your game has
• Channels

How are you, in the end, making things easier to Learn How To MUSH? Players still have to learn that there are alllllllllll those ways to communicate, learn who 'hears' what, and what reaches whom, and when. When is it appropriate to put OOC information in an IC medium? Learning IC =/= OOC is a huge hurdle for many to begin with.

http://mylifeforthecode.com/i-am-your-code/

I tend to avoid Rabid Crazy as much as I possibly can. That includes Rabid Crazy staffers who are Rabidly, Crazily against any form of natural humanity. TS/Sex, Nude Played-Bys, whatever.

If you're that triggered by sex and nakedness, who knows what else triggers you. Talking about Jesus/Muhammed/Buddha? Talking about drinking beer while RPing? Mention of your favorite celebrity/author/TV show? Chevy vs Ford vs Toyota? Coke vs Pepsi?

I just don't want anything to do with anyone that is that volatile.

Anything that is done by command line is, by sheer necessity, a complex command string, period. MUSH derives from MUD, all of them are telnet-based interfaces because that is what was around, cheap and easy to run in the 90s.

Most anyone who cannot fathom commands in MUSH are the either going to do one of two things:

1. complain, grump and walk away and go back to their non-coded Chat Room RP or
2. be intrigued by Something New and Cool enough to actually start to learn things.

The average intelligent player (and come on, you have to be intelligent to MUSH) will learn how to MUSH in a matter of one or two days for the majority of anything that they have to do. 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".

With that said, players will either be open to learning something new to fill an entertainment void in their life, or they won't. Format, media, interaction all matter, but what MUSH has going for it is the sheer quality of that entertainment, no matter how you present it.

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

I terminated someone with cause today. That sucks, even if I've done it a dozen times before.

I hated doing it, but it had to be done.

If you terminated this person a dozen times before, then it sounds like that's your fault. SHEESH.

<jk>

Why not start a project based on Electron, which is a cross-platform desktop application written in NodeJS, HTML and CSS (which a lot of people can then contribute to. This is the core of the Atom editor by GitHub, it powers Slack, Discord, Twitch, the new Skype, and hundreds of production applications. It combines the V8 javascript engine from Chrome, and is very easy to work with, and thus has a development ecosystem that is both very active and huge.

It could be modularly coded so that it could support plugins, and since it works natively with web technology, you can build it to interface both with old-school MUSH and new-school Ares/Evennia.

I'd be willing to help and contribute to the project, as I've always wanted to build a coder's editor that integrated directly with a MU* client.

EDIT: I'ma just going to start a project. Ping me if you wanna help/join/poke/test/contribute.

Good. I encourage it.

So we replace one client with the next, with... what new features?

We already have a client that updates and optionally pings/flashes/jumps up and down when there are updates/activity.

Will your web client allow for persistence of customization for things such as Macros, Events, Auto-response, Auto-walk/mapping? What about spawning new windows on events?

Since it's taken us two decades to develop any sort of reliable web-based integration from the game server, how long does anyone bet that a reliable full-feature replacement of the MU Client will be?

Unless you are actively participating in a development effort (like Griatch and team seem to be), I wouldn't hold my breath. Seems like something that will eventually go the way of pay-to-play, and you'll lose a lot of the current crowd with that.

Sort of related to MU and not just the specific client:

/grab <object>/<attr>
and having that loaded into the input window of Potato, ready to edit and send.

/grab me/desc

@jaded
As long as it sells merchandise, that is all that matters to these companies anymore. The story/movie itself can suck. This can be seen in the abrupt and massive shift that happened to Saturday Morning cartoons.

Early morning tea, amazing music, and a flood of creativity that Gets Things Done on your MU design, revitalizing your craving to Do It again.

A window is a window. When you start factoring in multi-tasking (aka Fragmented Attention Span) on players, layered atop RL... I just feel that more is less.

Wikis are nice for a reference, a go-to place for Bios, logs and updates, and especially Theme information, Setting, etc. I think that all of that should be in-game to accommodate those that do a single pane of glass experience, too, however.

@ixokai said in TinyMUX: Info Storage:

@rook said in TinyMUX: Info Storage:

Port to Rhost. <no, seriously>

Use clusters.

MUX doesn't have Clusters. That is why I recommended that @Melpomene port their game to Rhost.

Does anyone stop to think that, for many characters, there ARE no Pretty People Pictures on the twitscape that looks like their horror monstrosity? If this is the case, then these wiki-bound MUs won't mind a blank played-by image, right? After all! We require a DESC on the game!

RE: Systems being too complex or too bland.

Pick one. Either you want the system to do the work for you via coded decisions being made on outcomes, or you trust each other to story-tell in a fair and exciting manner.

It's like the adage for many things: "Fast, Cheap or Good - Pick any two."

@Arkandel
When the system is geared, written, and balanced entirely around the concept of a small tight-knit and very inter-supportive group of PCs. When that concept of an RPG is taken into a multiplayer arena of every-character-for-themselves, it fails horribly and dramatically.