Posts made by SparklesTheClown

While back in the WORA days, WORA discovering a MU* could sometimes actually be the literal death of a MU*, due to all the general emotional toxicity that the forum would put on staff, MSB seems to actually make a significantly larger attempt at being constructive.

I mean, a lot of people in the hobby don't even know that MSB exists, which to me is a good thing, because it means MSB isn't being this Death Star of toxicity.

While as with WORA, I still consider MSB to primarily be a WoD thing rather than a MUing in general thing, I've noticed that MSB can have a positive influence on a new game rather than what was, in my opinion, WORA's almost universally negative influence on anything that wasn't WoD (because WoD people for whatever reason, came to accept a baseline level of toxicity, which is fucked up).

I say this as someone who literally hated WORA with a goddamned passion, so I like to think I lack bias.

My official black person statement re: diversity in comics, is basically this entire Cracked article:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/one-quote-that-explains-why-comics-suck-at-diversity/

@Bobotron Yeah but I think that's the point, that's what makes them hidden. Like, a lot of plot things in general, especially when I run plots, or even when I play characters, are based around player expectation. Understanding player expectation and doing things that kind of warp that perspective (and I don't mean lolrandomplottwist) is one way to make things a hell of a lot more interesting.

It not only plays to that expectation, but broadens it.

This might sound weird, but I enjoy grids that have interesting built in hooks, which was kind of how Multiverse Crisis MUSH's last grid was (I haven't seen the new one, so I can't comment on it). There was always cool stuff to do with a particular room.

I also enjoy plot hooks being hidden in a room desc, which is something that Megaman MUSH does. A lot of people don't even catch that they -are- plot hooks, so it's a pretty interesting thing.

Is anyone here into music production? If so, I'd love any resources or advice! I'm still new to all of this, learning music theory and sheet music and stuff. But I'm also trying to work my way around the concepts of production in of itself, even outside of music theory.

'Well, whatever you have to contribute, I don't mind! I pretty much want to learn basically anything, so don't be afraid to spill out your wisdom.

Also, yes, I have a midi keyboard. It's a cheap Samson Carbon 49, but it gets the job done until I can afford better. I use FL Studio for production, but I realllyyy wanna find a way to get Studio One, because it looks so intuitive.

Hello! Not that anyone's particularly curious about what I'm doing, I've been a bit more active in MUing after numerous brushes with life outside of the internet. I figured I'd write an update just in case I've somehow underestimated who even knows who I am at this point (I actually have a playlist here, by the way!).

So, let's talk about Hello!Project, the manchild who grew out of trolling but still watches wrestling and Power Rangers, and mass-consumes Japanese idols.

Well, a secret I've kept for virtually my entire time MUing, and one I also often kept irl, is that I only went to school up to about 4th grade, and am almost entirely self-educated. This is something I was ashamed of and insecure about for a very long time (astute readers might recall how hair trigger I used to be about my intelligence being insulted, if one played with me a while back).

Anyway, I say this to explain how getting a GED, while I know isn't that big of a deal, became this thing of validation for me for quite a while. I'm actually currently registered for the HiSET test (It's basically the older GED before a for profit company made it expensive and insane to pass). I'll be taking my first three in about three days (assuming a force of nature like a meteor doesn't fuck everything up).

Some might remember that I was seriously considering computer science. My plans for the future have almost never particularly involved college, but I always figured, "I'll do what ensures that I'll have the most money". Until, of course, I discovered either the death or the boon of all millennials, which is a passion.

I realized after a bizarre three week extended mental breakdown that I spent learning music theory, that I have an apparent passion for learning the inside and outs of music. Like, I don't even care about necessarily being a musician, but my obsession with producers and music production apparently carried over into it academically. So I actually found this great two year course at our awesome community college that teaches music production.

Like, you learn financial accounting and all sorts of stuff, on top of music theory and how to use expensive equipment I wouldn't have access to on my own in a million years >_>.

Anyway, since college isn't make or break for me, and community isn't particularly expensive, I figure this is a harmless pursuit. Not like going to a $140,000 to become a scholar of the Twilight books.

I've also been hanging out with people in two entirely different indie music sub-cultures in Philly, it's been interesting. I went to an album release party, but I drank my first long island iced tea, so I mostly spent the party wandering around and being confused.

But anyway, I guess that's all the important stuff for anyone who was possibly wondering if I was dead or something. Oh and I both picked up and quit binge drinking in the time I was gone. It was a good run. I also occasionally hang out with the headwiz of Mega Man MUSH and his wife, since they live near me, thus proving that I won't murder anyone if we ever meet.

Here is a gif to prove my identity.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/a11a7a20d97538cb94242f595f633293/tumblr_mmcamvbX7w1rrckvao1_400.gif

Thanks for the resources! I'll check them all out.

Our Kickstarter is now live!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/89095698/aethera-campaign-setting

@Derp said:

This could fairly easily be done.

So, think about this -- everything in the universe has some manner of momentum, something carrying it forward in a specific direction, and it resists changes to that. So why can't time be the same way?

Yes, you go back and rewind 30 seconds or so and save the boyfriend from getting shot. 30 seconds later, he's shot by someone else. You undo that, he gets hit by a car the next day, etc, etc, on down the line. Final Destination played with this to some effect. Just because you prevented -one- way of it happening doesn't mean you prevented it from happening.

So why couldn't time travel be the same? Sure, you can go back a bit, and you can make -huuuuge- changes to things, but you always find out that in the end, the exact same things have managed to happen, through whatever sort of events unfold to make them a thing. So time travel is only really useful for getting a new perspective on the past, or learning something that would otherwise be impossible, or testing certain limited changes. Not for anything really big, because no matter what, you come back and find out that time as you knew it is still the same. People who were dead are dead. People who are supposed to be alive resist dying outside their appointed time at any cost. They have the same positions, etc.

Yeah, I've definitely seen movies do that (Hell, it's pretty much the basis of The Time Machine), and it's a more interesting compromise to simple causality loops. I'd certainly play it.

@Misadventure said:

Players are able to create ideas, technologies, that actually alter the setting. Doing so isn't just buying a high stat or perk.

Players work on making progress, not on accumulating xp /permanent power levels.

Basically two huge reasons I play Mega Man MUSH. A gigantic chunk of the technology advancement in the setting has been player created. Like the CAGE System, which was created I think a year or two ago. Forcefields that immediately go up in public places to protect civilians from super people fights. A player created that, and it wasn't a thing before. (The forcefields will go down if they get attacked directly too much, so they're still important to protect).

@Chime Oddly enough, the drafters thing reminds me a little of the Capcom game, Ghost Trick. We have a few FCs from that on Mega Man MUSH. But it's not a regularly used power. I'm not actually sure if they still have those powers, since I haven't seen it used in almost a year even though the FCs are played. I should ask. But the drafters thing sounds -really- fun.

@ThatGuyThere Those sound like pretty reasonable ideas to make Prometheans playable. Maybe the wasteland effect could be replaced by something similar that doesn't make them unplayable, but retains the tragedy of the characters.

Overall, everyone makes good points about causality loops. I guess my thing is, I don't necessarily view all powers as necessarily needing to work in traditional ways. Time travel with causality loops obviously would mean that the point of time travel isn't to change the past. But you could, for example, have an organization that tries to investigate crime using time travel, and time traveling villains who try to -stop- them from gaining that information.

Perhaps the stability of the timeline means that you only get one shot in a particular location, because meeting yourself is a no-no, which makes time travel pretty high stakes even if causality loops make it impossible to actually change the past.

So, I wanted to have a bit of a constructive discussion about things that are commonly held as difficult or impossible to explore in a MUing environment. Obviously anyone can say "This is why you can't do that", but I would like people to think of things that people believe cannot be done, and then think of ways that they possibly could be.

It's also acceptable to point out something that seemingly can't be done, and then allow other people to figure out if it could be.

A notable example of something considered difficult or impossible to do non-destructively in a MU is time travel. Sure, there are examples of staff controlled time travel (String Theory, which is a Heroes MU, Mega Man MUSH, where we went back in time and met Street Fighter people in the 90s). However, time travel is still highly regulated. Mega Man MUSH handles time travel by simply saying that it creates an alternate universe rather than altering the present, but again, it's staff controlled.

Personally, I believe that player controlled time travel -is- possible. I wouldn't use alternate universes, because unregulated alternate universes would be -really- messy. I would simply state that time travel functions on causal loops. Not everyone would do it cleverly or even entirely correctly, but the fact remains that they cannot change history. They can dick around in history, they just can't change it, thanks to causal loops.

I know that the grandfather paradox is a thing, but I would ultimately override it with causal loops. "You killed Hitler! Holy shit!"

"Hey why did Nazis still happen?"

"Oh, I guess Hitler was never actually the original Hitler, but a double", and so on.

So yeah, I don't think time travel is a big deal at all, to be honest. Like any power, people would be expected to use it within reason. All powers can be abused. But if you can't go and instantly kill the president in the present, why would it suddenly be kosher to do in the past? Time travel doesn't really suddenly change the rules of what would be acceptable or not OOCly.

What kinds of things do you guys think are generally unacceptable, but believe you know how it could be done? I know most of you guys around here love WoD, so how about Promethean? Do you think that could work in a MU?

I will say this, from the perspective of someone who is on the far end of the newbie spectrum of code? I find the idea of learning Python to be way simpler and more appealing than scaling the wall of, say, MUSH code. It's not that MUSH code is more difficult, it's just that learning it never really felt all that intuitive to me. I feel like I could just up and go start learning Python and applying it right now if I wanted to, because there's a million resources. If one doesn't work, I can try another.

But as far as the subject at hand, I've never really seen player-side code fundamentally change an entire game? Except the controversy surrounding the random name generator on Match of the Millennium >_>.

It seems like more of a luxury than anything.

I'm always surprised when people mention MOOs in the same breath as MUDs. It's true, obviously, I don't deny it, but it's jarring because my primary encounters with MOOs are the ones made to work like MUSHes (No idea why people go through the trouble, instead of just making a MUSH).

But anyway, on the topic of building for the community. The community is already here and have tools that they're more than comfortable with, Evennia is something new that can possibly be used as a tool for new coders from outside of the community who can't possibly see why they'd bother with the current options.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't really view the priority of something like Evennia to be purely for maintaining the status quo in every way possible. But even if it was, people have illustrated that this isn't difficult to accomplish. Which is obvious if one has played a MUD. If people want to give options to build, MUDs have been giving players easy options to build for years, so obviously it's not beyond Evennia to be able to do if a particular game sees fit.

I'm not totally sure why we're still on this 0_o. People settled it multiple times by saying, "Yes, we can totally do this".

Considering everything I've learned about making tabletop books in the last few months (from actual published pros), I'm somewhat puzzled at why this is taking so long 0_o.

Maybe White Wolf is different.

Maybe there's rituals and blood sacrifices that are beyond my limited experience to understand.

The point isn't to make things more advanced, it's to use advancements in technology to make them -simpler-.

There's something I've often said, for years, not really to do with code or anything, but with, like, I guess nerds? We have this disconnect when it comes to what we know how to do and find simple and easy, and what other people know how to do and find simple and easy.

We're used to certain things, we think, "Well, this is easy to me, so obviously it couldn't possibly be any simpler". I've met people who had trouble figuring out how typing urls into a browser worked. And guess what? It could be easier.

That disconnect from everyone else, where we think, "Why can't they just -do- it, it's so simple!" is reflected in the fact that our hobby has barely evolved from a period where computers were considered almost totally inaccessible to people who weren't hardcore nerds.

It's not a flaw to be so good at things that one finds those things simple, because those things have become a part of your everyday skills. But when thinking of what's simple and what isn't, I think of this on two levels. What's simple for me, and what's simple for someone who has absolutely zero knowledge of the thing I know how to do. I feel like it's a great way to think in order to think of how things can be innovated and simplified.

I'm still working on a proposal for the Evennia people in between writing work that I'm actually getting paid for, so I think I should be able to illustrate what I mean soon.

@WTFE said:

When watching people talk about future MU* technology it's like the last 40 years of software research and development never happened.

That's kind of how I feel. It's like, when I think of the possibilities for MUing, I start to wonder if we've just entirely forgotten about literally everything else that could be applied to improve MUing.

What the hell is Beast? Are you literally playing the vampire's Beast now?

Good idea! I didn't think of that at all. I'll look those up.

So hey, I'm learning C++ for a pretty specific reason (It's practically required for any serious game design, as I know people in the industry), and I was wondering what your preferred way of learning C++ is? Like, not really looking for "Learn this instead" comments, I'm legit just looking for the easiest and most intuitive ways people have for learning C++.

I plan to learn Python once I'm at least making good progress with C++, but I already have a good way to learn that (which I can't use for C++, unfortunately), and that's CodeAcademy (which i love).

@Jaunt A training wheels approach is certainly interesting. Though perhaps the problem might be with the dig command in of itself. There are probably more intuitive and time saving ways to do building period, that don't involve digging room after room. We'll see.

I'm gonna remove myself from the discussion for the moment, mostly to collect my thoughts on it and write out an actually fleshed out idea for this baby's-first-MU package. I'll poke at the Evennia people as suggested earlier.