Posts made by skew

This has mostly all been covered, but I wanted to toss in some screen shots.

First, if you're playing on a game that's TinyMUX and uses the "usual" +poseorder code, you can do something like... &posebreak me=%r%b%b%[[%xh[name(%#)]%xn]%]

This will add a line break before a pose and the name of who is posing, so you can more easily track certain individuals.
So instead of...

This is the pose done by Ephemeris. This is where Ephea has said stuff. 
This is the pose done by Asteria. This is where Asteria has said stuff.

You get...

  [Ephemeris] 
This is the pose done by Ephemeris. This is where Ephea has said stuff. 

  [Asteria]
This is the pose done by Asteria. This is where Asteria has said stuff.

If your game client doesn't have customizable posebreak, please talk to the game admins! You can also ask if there's a "no spoof" command, such as on Arx. That helps.

Next, as @Roz said you can set quotes to highlight, and names to highlight.

For quotes, do "matches regexp" and "(.+?)". Do it again for smart quotes: “(.+?)”. I chose to use a color that's not BRIGHT WHITE because Atlantis' default colors blend together (white and highlight are the same, I think?).

Next, make sure you have your name + the name of people you are keeping up with highlighted. If the name is something unique, just do "is" and "name". And set a ton of them, to include all your nicknames, friends, whatever you want.

Finally, sometimes you'll have a name that's very common and appears throughout the game. Example: On Arx, "Mae" is part of "Maelstrom". So we can do a regexp to make sure it ONLY matches the word exactly. So, it'll match Mae and not mae or Maelstrom.

Finally, a lot of games don't use +posebreak, or their +posebreak doesn't make noise. I find the ding letting me know when something happens is very helpful. So what you can do, in Atlantis, is set an Event so it catches some text and dings. This is a two-part process. FIRST, you need the &posebreak code I posted above. Then, go to "Events" and "New Event". For the Conditions, click "Add condition..." and choose "Text: Matches Pattern". Now, I think you could just put in * and that'd be ok. But for me, l did "contains" and then I input the name of the person I'm RPing with. Yes, that means I need to update this, but it's really not an issue for me.
Next, go to "Actions" and choose "Add Action..." and pick "Atlantis: Beep". There you have it, you'll get beeped when a certain poses. Great in small scenes and in big scenes, where you're RPing mostly with a single person.

Please just holler if you can think of something else that might help you! I might be able to make it work.

Re: FFG SW system and enhanced creativity...

Instead of rolling flat dice against difficulties, you roll special dice (d8 or d12). Instead of numbers, you have different symbols, which represent success and failure, but also positive side effects, negative side effects, and then another layer of "critical" successes and failures.

That means on any given roll you not only can succeed or fail, but also there's a chance to have positive side effects beat negative and vice versa. So, you try to shoot the enemy. You roll more successes than failures, so you succeed! But there's more negative side effects than positive, so the shot goes through the bad guy and hits tank that contains toxic gas. Whoops.

It really sounds like a lot of fun!

Update: We've set a very loose timeline to get us toward a December 1 open date. Progress has been very fast, and using the FFG Star Wars system Faraday already had installed (and has quickly tinkered whenever we found something we didn't understand) has been very simple. Customizing Ares to look and feel and output information we want has been very straightforward.

I also want to add: there's no bells and no whistles. Our system has chargen, sheets, dice, XP, story points, and whatever else is built into AresMUSH. That's it. This game will emphasize stories and RP, not automated systems, minigames, etc. Combat will be done like on a pen and paper game, without automated NPCs or any such thing. No coded space flight (and, really, most of the game will take place in one small space), no dog fights, no... you get the idea.

That said, we are still discussing how to handle aspects that are easy to track in a tabletop, but not exactly easy or balanced on a MUSH. Things like, how do I buy/upgrade my spaceship. We'll get there! I'll add that we are fixing to learn Ruby and Ares to make some tweaks, but that's way down the road talk.

For anyone that's excited and wants more detail, in a week or two we're hoping to show off the public wiki which will help people that are planning characters.

We will need help with rooms and descs soon enough. This is the kind of thing that's easy to "Contract Out". Anyone that's seen the most of the Star Wars movie should be able to help us out.

I'm hammering out the "grid", but as is, we'll have one major city as the focal point of the game, with a few connected locations. So if anyone feels capable of taking a generic description (e.g., I need a gritty bar with miners go after work) and converting into a room desc, you can please let me know!

Minor glory hogging update...

We've been in contact with @faraday , we've got some ideas going. I don't want to be premature or raise hopes unduly or whatever else, but I'm fairly confident we will have a game.

Eventually.

@auspice @faraday is there an Ares discord group and/or hang out location?

Idea sounds wonderful. I regularly think about playing in a Star Wars universe without any of the, uh, Star Wars? I really dig the tech level, the way the government works, the mood and feel of the worlds. It all really interests me, but I hate the idea of being beholden (entirely) to a story that's fixed, or even a story where the "heroes" and "villains" are so well defined.

All that said, no idea how I can help. Compared to most everyone else here, I'm probably on the bottom end of the "Fan Knowledge" ladder. But I'll be happy to offer what I can?

@secretfire I'd say nearish half of the characters in the game are OC? Might be lower than that, but it's significantly greater than "a few". They are not odd nor rare. I just think there's a bigger pull toward rosters as most of the characters were designed carefully with meaningful ties to the stories. Or something.

For the game I'm making...
Carpenter Brut - Turbo Killer

Netflix's Maniac.

@rizbunz I find that even a "preview" chat is helpful. Players can start working on connections, stories, seeing what everyone else is up to, etc... and also staff/developers get a boost from knowing people are excited! I think it's a fine idea.

I've had a DigitalOcean droplet (running Mediawiki) set up for a while now. I finally got around to getting my domain. It was hours of me floundering around before I realized what all I was missing. Some searches has also suggested that, for some reason, Google's name service doesn't play nice with DigitalOcean? So, I wanted to record my suffering so as someone else here might avoid it.

First, Google will ask if you want to create a site or forward the address. You want neither. You need to go to "Configure DNS". You then go to the very bottom, under Custom resource records. Set the following:

• @ A 1h Your.Droplet.IP.Address
• www CNAME 1h domain.com

Next, make sure you go back onto your server, and updated LocalSettings.php. You want to set $wgServer to the address (with no slash on the end). Ex: www.example.com

When I first did this, I tried to set up forwarding. That's not the same thing. Then I set up Google to point at DigitalOcean's DNS host. That didn't work. Playing with DNS settings can be very frustrating as they can take "a while" to update. So... hopefully this saves someone a lil grief!

@rdc I'll msg you a link. @Ganymede and I did a lot of these for a different game. I don't know if G has worked on more since then, but I can send the ones I have.

@a-meowley said in Miami, Blood in the Water:

... and +repose, and +posebreak, and +poseorder, those are great too...

@Wretched has told me that he'll be installing all the goodies (or having me, or having me hold his hand, or whatever). So! Yes.

@faraday My Atlantis beeps all the livelong day. I think you just need to turn it on as it defaults to off.

And thank you! Beep beep!

Hi all,
Per the advice of many, I've restructured these two utilities so they store the data in the correct way. This is all back-end stuff, and no one should really see a difference.

In technical terms, I used to include secs() and dbref in the attribute name, and continually wiped those attributes. Now, the attribute name is d.pose.1001 or d.repose.10001. Every time poses (After the first time), it'll be readding the same already used attribute names.

For anyone currently using these utilities that wants to "update", you'll want to just "reinstall" everything, excluding making the objects and the @edit parts that edits the hook object functions.

I've also added &d.exclude.zones ... List zones in a space-separated list ( #1001 #2872) and it will exclude those zones.

These are both coded for TinyMUX.

Repose Reposer is here: https://github.com/skewskewskew/MUSHCode/blob/master/Repose Reposer.txt
Pose Order Machine is here: https://github.com/skewskewskew/MUSHCode/blob/master/Pose Order Machine.txt

@faraday Unless your client doesn't support that. Potato doesn't, best I know. The "next best thing" is to beg staff to create something like +beeptest. So my client can send that when it detects the "Your pose next" emit.

So, yes. Please let Ares let me have sound. Please.

@faraday said in Useful code on player bit:

@skew said in Useful code on player bit:

a poseorder that makes noise when it's your turn to pose

You mean, like, literally noise using the ANSI beep?

Literal, actual noise coming out of my computer speakers. The reason I picked up MUing (all of 5 years ago) is because I can do it while doing other things. Watching TV, washing dishes, even pushing my kid in the swing. When it BEEPS to alert me it's my turn, it's priceless.

Some people do not like +poseorder that shows who turn it is in the room. They feel it puts pressure on people who go slower, or enforces a "turn order" when they'd prefer more free-flow pose-when-you-have-something-to-day... in this case, the alternative is do a +poseorder/fixed # command. After X people pose (including just 1), it alerts me.

Need to implement that in my own code. But, yes. ANSI beep. BEEP!

@faraday

• A verbose +txt system,
• a poseorder that makes noise when it's your turn to pose
• +repose with line breaks in it and can be easily cleared
• a +watch system that not only notifies of log on/off, but also lists out things like idle times (and maybe the person's location),
• commands that allow + or not (ex, +txt or txt) (this makes stuff mobile-friendly)

I think that's all I got right now.

@melpomene I have a few things that I wrote myself, but mostly the things I want to see in a game... well. I started doing MUSHcode so I could put them into the game. So, any game I'm a coder on, my fun player stuff is on the game. I do think game owners and coders should be putting in more features, especially when they're very easy to implement.

That said, I started playing on Arx, where you can do no soft code. I sort of worked myself out of needing it.

Now, I think the only player-side code I use is on SFMux, though it's @Cobaltasaurus 's and I just @parent'd an object to her code. It's +mwhere (my where) to replace the game's +where, which neither of us could read.

Oh and I was typing I just remembered this... my +friend+ code! It allows you to add friends, then see if they're online and where they're at. Example:

-------------------------[Friend Finder LITE v0.8729]-------------------------
Name                          Conn      Idle           Location            
Lily ().......................Offline...-----..........Quiet Room..........
Milo (LD).....................Offline...-----..........SM1: Milo's Place - 
Jacey (jc)....................Offline...-----..........SM1: Jacey's Place -
Race (RV).....................Online....48m 3s.........NV1: Patio - Wake Ho
-----------------------------------by skew------------------------------------

Here's the code. Works on MUX.

&CMD.FRIEND.ADD me=$+friend/add *:@assert t( pmatch( %0 ))=@pemit %#=[FRIEND] '%0' does not return to a valid player.;@pemit %#=[FRIEND] You add [name(*%0)] to your personal FRIEND list.;&dat.friendlist %#=[setunion(u(%#/dat.friendlist), pmatch( %0 ))]

&CMD.FRIEND.DEL me=$+friend/del *:@pemit %#=[FRIEND] You remove [name( *%0 )] to your personal FRIEND list.;&dat.friendlist %#=[setdiff(u(%#/dat.friendlist),pmatch( %0 ))]

&CMD.FRIEND.WHO me=$+friend:@pemit %#=strcat( center(ansi( r, [, h, Friend Finder LITE v0.8729, r, ] ),78, -),%r,ljust( Name, 30), ljust( Conn, 10), ljust( Idle, 15), ljust( Location, 20),%r,iter( u(%#/dat.friendlist),strcat( ljust( strcat( name(##), %b, %(, %ch%cx, get( ##/alias ), %cn, %) ),30,.),ljust(ifelse(gt(conn(##),0),Online,Offline),10,.),ljust(ifelse(gt(conn(##),0),exptime(idle(##)), ----- ),15,.),ljust( name( loc( ##)), 20,.)), ,%r),%r,center( by skew,78,- ))

And finally, (t)UMS has been converted to be Rhost friendly. Anyone using Rhost that is looking for totally unnecessary messenger system can find it here:
https://github.com/skewskewskew/MUSHCode/blob/master/unnecessary messenger system RHOST.txt

This is designed to be used with the SGP/basics install of Rhost (the one that comes with "Globals: CRON - Myrddin's" already installed). Big thanks to @Ashen-Shugar for not only helping with the conversion but also updating Rhost itself to do the things I wanted it to do.