Best posts made by Sparks

I really think it depends on what your game setup is.

A game where you have open scenes, where I can wander around the city and stumble into a scene that happens to be in public? I feel like your grid should directly reflect the size of your playerbase. If you have only 10 players, you probably don't need hundreds of rooms. But if you have 200 active players, maaaaybe your grid should be large enough that you don't have 10 people in every single room on grid all the time.

Conversely, if you're on a game where every scene is closed/invite-only, I feel like you almost maybe don't need a traditional grid at all. You could do something like have a series of preset descs to pull from, a map to show where those locations are, and a temproom system where you can use those descs easily. (After all, otherwise you have the problem of "Joe and Kate are using the bar, but I wanted to hold a scene there" and you have to use a temproom anyway.)

@Alamias said in Good TV:

@Coin said in Good TV:

@Sparks said in Good TV:

Lucifer's been renewed for a fifth (and final) season. So, they'll have a chance to end the story the way they want, rather than leaving it on a cliffhanger when it doesn't get renewed at some point.

It's smart. They already had to save it once.

Lucifer was always slated to be a 5 year run, so they are just getting to finish it up like they always had intended to do.

Which is honestly refreshing; I like when a series has a defined story arc instead of "how long can we keep going?"

@il-volpe said:

Can anybody tell me where Atlantis puts it's damned addressbook file, so I can just open it in terminal and grab all my passwords? I've forgotten them, of course, and want to transfer the info to a second computer, and as far as I can tell, one cannot unmask them.

Sorry, I missed this post way back when you made it, so now I'm replying SUUUUPER LATE when you probably no longer need it.

However, if you go into your hidden '~/Library' directory and copy the 'Application Support/Atlantis' directory over to the same spot on a new computer, you'll get all your worlds/spawns/hotkeys/etc. If you want window positions and such as well, you can grab ~/Library/Preferences/net.riverdark.Atlantis.plist and copy that over too.

I sadly didn't make a good tool for revealing passwords (which is why Atlantis 2.0 will use Apple's keychain system), but the .awd (Atlantis World Data) files are just Apple's binary class serialization plists; it's possible to get passwords out of them that way. I could also whip up a quick tool to walk world files and dump character/password combinations when needed to recover them.

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

I am reasonably certain that if I told every guy who was eagerly awaiting war systems for Dominion or everyone who wants PRP support or any criminal type who wants crime or every apothecary who wants recipes or every combat character who wants combat styles or everyone waiting for magic that all of these will be delayed by a year as I painstakingly look for the most unambiguous verb possible for each command and do my best to make everything as clear as possible through repeated submissions of help files for review that I would be murdered in my sleep.

Honestly, Tehom, weird cases of doubled-up commands like @time/time and such notwithstanding, I think the bigger help would just be something like the guides that are on the unofficial wiki.

As an example, @retainer/@agents/guards is a wildly unclear system to many people. What are the differences? Why are they three separate systems? Which command do I use for various things? It could use a guide. Just to address the single most-common use case, a 'help animal messengers' that guided you through setting up one would solve a lot of problems.

Heck, in the short term, you could even just have the help entry link to the unofficial wiki's unfinished guide on the subject.

Given that players have been quite manifestly willing to write the documentation up for the unofficial wiki, I think you can probably source a lot of the clarifying content from players; you can still focus on coding the big systems in general, and still manage to get the guides and helpfiles clarified.

Players tend to want to help with the things they can, after all.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

@Sparks yeah it's not great at my company either, but we have teams of people working on it, on recruiting undergrads and partnering with STEM facilitation community programs for the future, which I love. We had a Black Girls Code workshop here recently.

I think it's going to be better going forward. We're much nearer parity with our paid interns lately, especially in electrical engineering.

@il-volpe said:

(Though I do wish it'd give me the option to unmask the passwords, and also and get a tinyfugue-like list of my existing worlds in a 'character-name, password, address, port, new line, next-character-name...' format for relatively easy hand-porting into other MU clients.)

There's actually a way to do that—I had a way to export worlds as a tiny.worlds file—but it was an experimental feature that only ever made it into the debug/development builds. I'll see if I can't dig up a working 10.6 VM and stick that feature back into the main release once I'm back from Yet Another Business Trip and near my actual computers.

@faraday said in Web-based MU poll:

@Miss-Demeanor said in Web-based MU poll:

@faraday I wouldn't say they're content with the wiki... given that they felt it necessary to make their own wiki, since the one provided didn't meet the needs of the players.

Oh did they? I didn't know that. (I don't play there, just chat with folks who do.) Curious what needs it didn't meet.

Inability to add pages as players, mostly.

Arx has the Evennia webserver set up to show dynamically generated character profile pages, organization pages, to automatically log public events (and also store logs of private events you can view if you were invited to or attended that event), and so on. You can view a lot of the help topics and other theme right there on the website as well.

However, other than the journals, there's really no way for players to edit content there. Want to write a guide on "How to use the +task system?" Can't do that. Want to make a reference page for public knowledge on a given historical event (like the Tragedy at Sanctum, or the Battle of the Night's Grove)? Nope. Want to write up random additional player content like, for instance, "A Comparative Summary of the Types of Cheese Found in the Lyceum"? Also nope.

That's where a wiki comes in handy: you have much more freedom for guides and other pages beyond what just the staff want to write.

My. Freaking. Ankle. Has. Not. Healed.

It has been a month and a half. I know severe sprains take a while to heal but I would like to be able to walk around without having to have an ankle brace, and to not worry about sudden stabbing pains when I take a step.

It is now harshing my mellow and eroding my patience.

@Auspice said in Mac Client Recommendations?:

So I discovered today...

Events set to a specific character do not work. In this case, it was just a timer made to send '@@' every 1800 seconds. Did not work on the character definition, but did for the world.

Is this expected behavior?

Uh... yikes, no, definitely not expected. I have events on characters that work fine, so that's definitely odd.

The only thing I can think of is that there may be an edge case where if you haven't done something (switching the tab in the address book away from events or something) it might not have committed the event, which would cause it not to fire. I haven't seen that particular problem in ages, but maybe it's the issue here?

Regardless, I'm still working on Atlantis 2.0, a complete clean rewrite in Swift for modern macOS. Unfortunately, Atlantis 1.x doesn't compile well on modern Xcode, because some of the code dates back to offer compatibility with OS X 10.4.

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

@yourmamasayswhat

They are a myth. Like Santa clause.

I don't hit on Luca! Does this mean I'm mythical? Or, to pick another word, legendary?

@Auspice - my insurance has tried to pull that shit.

So, I'd like to try injections into my scalp, although "like" may be too strong a term. "Oh, well, we don't really want to cover that procedure. Hey, have you tried pills?" YES. ALL OF THEM. For more than half of my life.

Fine, I'll try to get aimovig instead. "Oh, have you considered injections?" Screw you, you spent two years telling me you wouldn't cover those until all other options had been tried! Now you want me to try it? No, we're going with what the neurologist suggested!

"Oh, we'll only cover aimovig for people with intractable chronic migraines." What the hell do you think I have?! "You need to exceed a certain number of days off headache per month. How many did you have last month?" 18 days. If you want to count the constant lower severity migraine that never goes away, 31. "Yeah, if the migraine is a baseline state it doesn't count as a migraine attack. And you need attacks on more than 22 days a month for us to classify you as suffering chronic migraines and cover aimovig." Are you shitting me?! Because my migraine never goes away it counts as baseline and thus not chronic?!

Long story short, I gave up on the insurance, got the aimovig anyway, and thank god because it has been life-changing. Also UnitedHealthcare is terrible and should be taken out and put in the trash.

I hope your new insurance is better about this than your current (or mine); good luck!

Alas, it's not ready yet. I know a few others (@Roz among them) are champing at the bit to get a build. I promise as soon as there's one that's ready, I'll toss it out there.

Other than "complete clean rewrite", the main things I've made sure to add are:

• Way, way better spawn content system, allowing much more interesting formatting (like putting roundrects around pages, for instance) and much faster changing of fonts and colors.
• Spawns are now made of lego-type blocks that can be snapped together. Want three input areas in your spawn template? No problem. (I don't know how much of that I'll expose to the user, but internally? Very easy to design entirely new spawn content layouts.)
• Ability to use a 'proxy' system you can set up, which ensures you stay connected even if you're offline, and allows you to pass a connection between desktop and mobile versions.
• Ability to export/copy events.

I admit, I've been missing Lost Stars (original, invite-only science fiction game a friend and I ran years ago) something fierce lately, in part because of discussing the old DICE system I designed for there. But thinking on LS for systems design discussion reminds me how spaceships plus mysteries around ancient alien ruins was a fun combination.

LS had a distinct story arc, though, and we pretty much concluded it.

@Auspice - My employer literally retains a "health care advocate" now; if the insurance gives trouble, we can just email her the details, and she can go snarl and breathe fire at UHC on our behalf. Which is an improvement inasmuch as now I won't have to go snarl and breathe fire at them (I am not good at snarling), but it's really freaking sad that this is a thing we actually need.

ETA: Ugh topiramate. I hate that medication. And if it's not even working right anymore... I hope you find what works for you, I really do.

HELLO YES.

(UC is my favorite Gundam continuity—no surprise, since 0083 Stardust Memories is probably my favorite Gundam series—and I find myself very interested indeed.)

@ThatGuyThere said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):

@faraday said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):

I don't understand why you're equating "web based" with "not real time". I just responded to your forum post 16 minutes later. Is that not "real time"?

For the purposes of MUSHing I would not consider a 16 minute wait to be real time. I know it is a personal preference thing but if a sixteen minute wait was the norm for a scene with someone I would not be in a scene with that person often.

So, I'm a long-time MU*er but I also engage in MMO RP. (Predominantly for The Secret World, because frankly, who doesn't want to be a clueless newbie immortal fighting against eldritch monstrosities?)

And I will say, it's a wildly different thing. MMO RP tends to be on forums, or in Google Docs, and you'll write a paragraph or two and then sometimes find yourself waiting hours. I've had scenes that took weeks to play out because of that pacing. That can drive me nuts.

On the other hand, I can toss off a pose or two into a Google Doc scene over my lunch break at work, where I cannot really easily commit to enough time for a MU* scene. And I never have to ask for reposes in a forum or Google Doc!

But I don't think this limitation is inherent to the technology. There's an expectation among web-RPers of forum threads and Google Docs and so on being slower paced, sure, but that's a cultural thing. There's no inherent reason a web-based system has to be drawn out, just like there's no inherent reason a telnet-based MU* system has to be immediate. (Save the fact that the connection is inherently more stateful with telnet; you can't log in, pose, log out again, log back in and pose, etc. Not like flipping to a forum or gdoc to check for a pose and toss in a reply.)

And I think there are definite benefits to the idea of a chargen that happens in a webpage, setting up events via a web form, and so on.

Looking at a webpage and clicking on things are concepts everyone's used to; think of reading bboards with a web-forum like interface as opposed to, "Oh, wait, which was this game built on? Is it +bbread, or @bb/read, or @read, or..."

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

sausage and pineapple pizza

@Thenomain said in NOLA: The Game That Care Forgot:

@Arkandel said in NOLA: The Game That Care Forgot:

Are there new features available?

In computer terms, a beta means a feature freeze; no new features, just fixing and tweaking the existing ones. It's meant to focus on bug-fixing.

In theory an alpha is when something is functional enough to mostly use but not feature-complete, a beta is when things are feature-complete and frozen to put into testing, where the focus is on bugfixes. Then you have release.

That's a great theory; it hasn't been the case for a lot of the software industry for years.

At some point "beta" came to mean "people outside the company are using it". Look at how often MMOs have "closed betas" well before they're done. Look at how long Gmail stayed in "beta". Etc.

Generally nowadays it seems as though "beta" means "it's not done but you can use it" and "alpha" means "it's not done and it might also explode at any moment".

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

A buddy of mine got me to watch The Expanse, finally, by recommending it as 'everyone of these idiots could be a MU character'.

He wasn't wrong.

This makes sense, because the Expanse actually started as an online RP game, albeit forum RP rather than a MU*. The Roci crew are apparently all based on PCs from that. The original players are the folks in the acknowledgements for Leviathan Wakes.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/the-evolution-of-james-s-a-coreys-space-epic-the-expanse/

(I like to imagine that after a certain point, every time Holden's player was like "I open a comm link" all the other players were OOCly groaning.)

@arkandel I use git on a daily basis, and while I used to be the hardcore "I will use the command line, for it gives me POWER over ALL ASPECTS of creation (or at least of this source control repository)!" type, I have come to like the visual representation that Fork (my current favorite) will show me of branches and commits. I vastly prefer the nice graphical format to the older school git log --graph --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit