Best posts made by skew

@hedgehog Thank you for asking! And sorry for further derail, but it's mildly on top, right...?

First, there's the tarot card reader type. One player I know has done this a few times, with OOC knowledge of how to actually read tarot cards, and an online draw generator (though others have laid out cards, IRL, and done it). Basically, you just read the fortune in game as you would out of game. This is what the cards have shown. This is what it could mean. There's nothing concrete or precise by the very nature of tarot card readings. From there, it's a matter of what people (players/characters) take from it. It's RP fodder.

The second method, as I mentioned, involves asking OOC questions. As I said, you like it to be a little creative and new, and not just a rehash of what you already know. But a player could ask about current love interests, or about recent activities. Heck, you could even ask about upcoming adventures (and PrPs). The key is to keep things specific to a character so it feels personal, but broad enough that there's room for interpretation. From there, it's up to the player.

Specific example... and I'll try to keep names obscured...!

A soothsayer-type (a changeling) read the fortune of a woman. He asked her a few basic questions, then read her wiki page, and went from there. She had a burgeoning relationship with a werewolf, and so the soothsayer talked (in very round about, mystical language) about a romance with a big black wolf. The woman was positive that it was the werewolf in question, and dove headfirst into the relationship. OOCly, mind, the soothsayer knew nothing of the real situation. Only the little snippets of information. And OOCly, the player was just as much "on the fence" about this romance as the character. It gave OOC and IC reason to pursue something new and exciting.

Of course, after being in the relationship for a bit, she finally saw him shift... and saw that his wolf form was grey and brown. Not the big black wolf. Ogod! Shortly after, the relationship went sour, and the characters were able to point to the fortune as the reason why. Of course, the woman realized a close friend of hers had a "spirit patron" that was a massive black fox. Could be that the soothsayer mistook wolf for fox, because surely he's never seen a massive black fox before!

The trick is to give fodder, and to let players come up with their own stories. Make sure the other players know that you're "cheating" a little, via using OOC information that you might not ICly know. But so long as there is trust and openness there, I think a little "metagaming" can go a long way to making a lot of fun.

@ThatOneDude I'll take that as admittance. Some of us don't want a single player ST to have control over the tri-county police force, and agents of the God-Machine, and powerful vampires, (and time and space,) all played in a small realm where other PCs are unable to interact with the plot. For some players and staffers, that makes a game very uncomfortable, because one individual plot gets disconnected from the game.

On the other hand, some people like that. A lot of people do, and there's nothing wrong with that, but saying the one preference is inherently wrong or worse than the other is silly. It'd be like going into a MLP-only game and asking to play a carebear, then calling people names on MSB when you're not allowed to.

So, I say, if you want to play in a sandbox world, and you can't find a game that caters to it, start your own.

Otherwise?

@Sunny said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Now I feel bad for probably breaking the streak. -.- Though they're not the commoners in question.

Yeah, how dare you get married. Yuck.

@highfalutin I much prefer ChimeMUX because it's possible to install it. And prefer Rhost over all of it, because omg so much easier. But enough whining, right?

https://github.com/sean-brandt/tinymux/blob/master/mux/SQL

Some actual instructions. Go down to "In-Line/Synchronous SQL" and that should be what you need. When you do the actual ./configure, you add those options on. As it says, if your MySQL is not in the right spot, if your user doesn't have the correct rights, etc, you'll need to deal with that. BUT... that'll do it.

Doing the configure and rebuilding TinyMUX... shouldn't delete anything. But I'd back up first, just to be sure.

@highfalutin Lots of ways, but as an example...

@search eval=strmatch(zone(##),#817) -- in this case, #817 is my zone in question. It'll process every object and return only the objects with their zone set to #817.

Alternately, th search( eroom=strmatch(zone(##),#817) ) is a little more efficient. eroom will do an eval (like above) but only on rooms. Otherwise, it's the same thing. search() will return a string of dbrefs. @search will return the name + debref, with a line break. So, if you're searching because you want to know "what rooms are here, by name", you can @search. If you want to then process the information, you can use search().

@Coin Wait I have (a not as good) one for this, too...

https://i.imgur.com/MEnQqcd.gifv

Hopefully a fairly harmless example...

Someone had a room configured incorrectly in a game. When you'd look at the list of rooms, it stood out like a sore thumb. It was annoying to look at, for me.

Now, a friend and I said... Surely this person is aware that they have their room configured wrong. How can they not be. It's so flipping obvious. Surely someone already said "Hey, fix it". And they didn't for whatever reason.

But surely this person knows is a pretty dumb thing to think. So, I paged them. I said, "Hey, is this intentional? And if not, can I help you?" the response was, "OMG thank you! I have no idea how to fix it and I haven't been able to get any help."

So I sent the person the command to fix it. Et voilà. Problem fixed.

Key is, of course, that you have to do this carefully and tactfully. If you can think of a way to carefully and tactfully say, "Hey, I noticed that your play style doesn't exactly jive with the media I'm used to seeing. I was just wondering if that was intentional?" (which, maybe just copy+paste that line) then do so. Because maybe this person is doing it on purpose. Maybe they're not. But if you're respectful and honestly trying to have a conversation, and you don't push, and you don't judge, then it'll be fine!

And if you can't be careful and tactful, poke a friend who can.

I like the idea of building a grid based on points of interest, not geographical locations. When helping construct BITN's Grid, we basically reviewed the area (admittedly large) and found the sites/towns that were interesting, and put those into the game. I then compiled a spreadsheet of all the different sites, and listed out a "type" for them, and reviewed that list to make sure I had "something for everyone". Poor area, rich area, wild area, commercial area, etc. From there, we had players requesting additional areas, and I believe it worked pretty well.

The grid became more about what was conducive to play than what was realistic. You'd skip a dozen towns/places/areas going from point A to point B, but there was very little value in that. I like to think of it a bit more like Baldur's Gate's map, rather than a logical map of the city. Skip over a few miles, cause they're boring (or more likely, redundant).

So, maybe shoot for 5-10 neighborhoods (those are your "grid squares"), and then shoot for a few locations within each. Assuming, of course, your game works like that!

More practically, use tools to build your grid! For individual rooms (and/or small builds), I have a tool, here: http://musoapbox.net/topic/850/a-tool-for-grid-building-digging

For doing big areas at once, use MUSHroom: http://mushcode.com/MushRoom

If you'd like any advice on either, feel free to give me a poke. Just a TOW BIG WARNINGS on MUSHroom: if you choose to start from the current room instead of a new room, it will overwrite your current room and if you create a big space in MUSHroom, you will eat up your input buffer. Break it down to sending 30-50 lines at once, otherwise you'll end up unsure where it cut off.

Cheers!

If you DL Beip from the Windows Store, it's logged as a Windows Game and integrates with all the various Windows Gaming features... which I honestly didn't know existed until Beip! That said, @Arkandel seems to have got it.

Is out now! For iOS, in the USA, at least!

I found this thread with a lot of helpful information in it: https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongo/comments/4rlnmc/some_tips_from_my_last_days_playing/

For those that do not know, Pokemon Go is a (free) augmented reality mobile game (for android and iOS). Basically, you can see yourself on a map, and see things around you, which include Pokestops (which are landmarks and etc that award you points for going to) and also pokemon. When you get a pokemon, you can turn on your camera and it'll show the beastie standing there in front of you. It requires walking around, exploring, etc.

So, anyone playing? Any fun stories?

My second catch, because I forgot to snag the first one:

I'm going to +1 the "the community walks away from single sphere games".

Many spheres = more characters = more stuff to do = more players = more stuff to do = ... You get the idea. We have a Changeling game that's been going for a while, single sphere, and it is holding it's own, and coming up on a year old, but even then it's quiet most of the time. There's a core group that enjoys their time, and for many people, that's just fine. But we hardly have the player base to support much more.

I've seen as people walk away from other single-sphere games because it's boring, because they like the inter-sphere interaction, or because they can't find a scene.

All that said, I think some games to play better in the single-sphere setting. Vampire does, because it's a lot more player-against-player. Changeling seems to play well, because there's a fair amount of politicking and player-against-player action, while also having an oddly dedicated fan base. I think Mage is way hard, due to the constant need for staff attention. Likewise, werewolf is very difficult, as someone needs to be running the Hisil, and that takes a lot of effort.

I'll say best wishes to whatever single sphere game is in the chute, but I have my doubts.

Short answer: It'd be a little tricky, or a lot sloppy, but is doable.

Long answer: The data is not stored "in" the template. The database is stored exactly as you see it when you edit your page. It's when you call that page that the wiki renders all of that information, and calls whatever templates are in use. This means there's no table that holds all the people using all the templates, all the data they've entered, etc.

How I'd do it is essentially specify the variable, then trim everything before the variable. Then look for the next pipe, and trim everything after it. I'd have to do a little more studying on SQLing to get that going, but it think the concept is sound.

As for +events, I could see a few ways of easily doing it. Output the data from the MU into an SQL table, then have MediaWiki query the table on demand. It looks like there's a few options ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SQL2Wiki ) but they are all flagged as dangerous, or a security risk, because you are meddling with the database. I'm not sure if it's possible to lock an extension down in a way that it only functions when an admin type is the one to first use it.

All in all, it looks possible. Personally, I wouldn't have time to think any harder about this for at least a week.

@derp @faraday Yes, the say command uses angled, fancy, open/close quotes. Whatever they're called.
My original event doesn't capture them, either. Frankly, I never saw the need, it's so very rare. But! If you want to capture them, using @ixokai 's suggestion, you'd just create a new event same as the other and use the pattern: “(.+)”

@Ganymede As long as you're not on FB whining about Pokemon, it's totally okay. You can tell them I gave you my permission.

Unless then they're red team, then you leave them alone.

@Thenomain I think listing "suggested donation" and setting up a Patreon or whatever for people to kick money into would help. Admittedly, I don't know how Patreon works exactly, but taking on projects as they come, on your own time, with your own preferences, and having a way for people to send money to you sounds a lot better. Plus, I bet if BrandNewGameX(tm) had a good showing, the owners would link said account and you'd get players tossing in.

This will keep your hobby a hobby, your good will gesture just that, plus you'd have a little extra scratch come rent due.

@Sunny - Just to give an idea, I coded posebreak and repose, and it was probably upwards to 20 hours? More? To get through it all. There was a lot of time sit staring at screams and trying to figure out what commands and functions were available, and some of that would be reduced by someone who knows the code better, but to dump 40 hours into a system isn't unrealistic, if you include time spent planning, tweaking, debugging, etc.

@Bobotron @SunnyJ and I have been strongly if single sphere games can work at all. I'm leaning towards "no", unless it's Vampire.

There's just a certain level of self propulsion that doesn't exist in single sphere games. There's also the reality that more players = more play = more players = more play.

I think a single sphere game can continue ruining if there's a story that's being followed and STs that are committed to telling the story. You may end up with a just a few players that are regularly logging in, but so long as you can be happy with that? You'll be ok.

Though, as a note, the game ends up playing a little bit like a tabletop, just way, way slower. I'm probably getting off into a whole new rant, but when players take 5-10 minutes to get out a pose, and you have 5 of them, a fairly simple scene can end up taking hours. If you are doing single sphere, story intensive, I'd suggest you keep in mind that you may well end up in the "basically a tabletop" situation, and plan accordingly, and finds way to keep things moving.

@krmbm @Ninjakitten @Rucket The Beip Dev (Bennet) is reading this thread now and then. Just doesn't have an account to reply. He's open to adding a feature to move the tabs to top if folks find it that jarring.

And for Ninjakitten specifically, there's no way to turn off the "auto copy on highlight", but I'll be sure to pass the suggestion along (even if he did already read it).

@Auspice said in Pokemon Go:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/14/12193236/pokemon-go-hillary-clinton-campaign-event-pokestop

IS CLINTON ON TEAM MYSTIC?

Asking the tough questions. I might have to vote Trump...

@nyctophiliac I had this very, very elaborate dream. Staff was rolling out some kind of Next Phase to the metaplot, and part of that was kicked off by this very, very long and detailed book being released, and my having stumbled on it. It was a long history, with names and places and myriad details. I forgot most of it upon waking up, but one detail remained, about a particular person being 106 years old, after sacrificing the would-be heir to the throne (the little kid appeared to just get sick and die naturally).

In the dream, I finished reading this book, and was all "woah" and stepped away from my laptop to go do something in the house. Then I noticed lights flickering in my office, which is sort of down the hall from the rest of the house. I went to investigate, and all the lights went off in there. So I went to get a flashlight, and soon as I brought the flashlight into the room, it also flickered and shut off. Then the darkness started to spread room to room and consumed my whole house.

When I actually woke up, I had to go check on the whole house, check on the family, etc etc.

Fun stuff.

Misc...

I hate the tiny input window size!
Me, too. So...

• Rt Click on your input window, choose Settings.
• Look for "Height in lines..." You can set the minimum (I have 3) and the maximum. You can also stop it from resizing.

Tabbing between input windows
If you have multiple input windows, you'll find hitting tab just inserts a tab. So...

• Options up on the top. Keyboard Shortcuts...
• Look for Input Window - Activate next input pane. Set your keyboard shortcut for that! (Setting it to tab works just fine.)
• Note that I think the 'next input pane' cycles based on the order in which they were created.

Turn off the history/echo window

• Up top, Options -> Show history window

I also hate the way the output window puts text RIGHT UP AGAINST my input window...

• Right click the output window, Settings -> Margins. Add some margins!

It doesn't pause when I'm scrolled up!
No, it doesn't... BUT...

• You can turn off scrolling all together by right clicking on the output window, Settings*, scroll to bottom on new text.
• Beneath that setting, there's "Split on page up"... check that, then hit page up. It's super neat.
• You can go to Options up top, then Keyboard Shortcuts... and set a pause button for "Output Window - Pause". This pauses the screen.

Can I make it scroll smoothly?

• The specific behavior seems to be some trackpad scrolling causing it to jump, like, 20-30 lines at once. I don't have an answer to this ATM, but I'll ask the dev.

Show time and date of messages?

• Rt click on the output window, Settings..., in the bottom left there's "Show Date and Time Tooltip". That will make it so when you mouse over text it shows you when it was received and how long ago that was.