Posts made by Sparks

My best friend has never played an AC game and absolutely loves Odyssey, for whatever that's worth.

@kumakun said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

@faraday said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

I have also looked at Discord/Slack/etc. for ideas and mentioned it various times this conversation's come up. A lot of people just RP in Discord, so it's a good starting point for looking at the general paradigm.

What other kinds of places have people jumped too besides MU*s? Again, I've been out of the loop for a little while!

I think it's less that existing players have 'jumped to' alternatives, and more that many younger RPers start on those alternatives and never even try any MUSH/MUCK/MOO/etc. variant.

@tinuviel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

@faraday said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

But for folks like me, the Evennia team, and @Kumakun who are investing in design for the next generation of platforms - I should hope so.

Sure. But if those future plans aren't aimed at us... why ask for our input? Not aiming this at you fara, but at the thread itself.

I think because there's an implication that we want fresh blood in the community. And for folks who have grown up never seeing a DOS prompt and who find laptops that don't have touchscreens frustrating, SimpleMU (or Potato, or Atlantis, much less tinyfugue) is not a friendly or intuitive interface. This isn't to say everyone new is going to eschew traditional clients, but it lowers the barrier to entry if you don't require them.

I'm personally loathe to leave behind Atlantis myself, because I like how my spawns work, and I hate having a separate tab in my web-browser open for every world I'm on, and so on. And most web-clients don't give me anything better than I can already get with a local interface. (Plus, Evennia has a screenreader setting and a strict 'all stock code must be screenreader friendly' policy, which are much easier to enforce over a plaintext interface than a web-one.)

But that doesn't mean I don't want web integration to make it easier for others to join in. Plus, there are a lot of things I think I do prefer to use on the web: bboards, mail, +job systems, etc. This is why my stock Evennia toolkit I'm building has a strong focus on web integration.

Faraday's ideas for how 'scenes' can work—a web interface sort of like Storify rather than a traditional web-client, but still supporting a traditional plaintext interface for old-school users—are a good example of a place that feedback from existing MU*ers can be valuable.

After all, even moving forward, there's a desire not to completely leave behind the people who are already in this hobby, so there's a desire to see what people think of new ideas.

Now, if people don't want to invite in new blood, or don't want to make games more accessible to people, that's fine; this conversation probably isn't for them. But there are a lot of people—the folks working with Ares or Evennia, the Penn and Rhost teams trying to graft web integration into existing servers, etc.—who want to find the way to not just leave behind existing players, but to bridge the gap so there's continuity between current MU*ers and RPers who are just coming into the hobby.

And I think that's what this conversation is about, and why it recurs so often around here.

My condolences to those who knew him well. It's never easy when a member of a community passes away.

@kumakun said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

I absolutely love Ares' web integration, it's inspirational. Evennia's integrated too, but I feel Ares focuses more on the community aspect.

There's no reason you can't do the same integration on Evennia, fwiw; Ares is just a complete game out of box, while Evennia is a flexible system to build a custom game from scratch.

I prefer Evennia, but that is merely because I like to build custom stuff and am vastly more at-home in Python than Ruby; Ares is definitely the easier/more friendly option to get something up and running right away.

@griatch said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

@Sparks
As said, I'm not the target audience, but it's a good start I think. Maybe you should (already in your README since that is the front-page of github), add links to the places in your code where people can find the concepts (finger, notifications etc) so they can quickly dive into the bits they are interested in.

That's an excellent idea. I've tried to clean it up a bit and add some hints on where to look.

Okay, so, I don't think that tutorial worked as well as it could. I'm now slowly making a little Evennia sandbox for MUSHers, which will have commands/code they can examine and play with more easily. I'd welcome feedback on it.

Right now it just has a who, where, and finger (with customizable fields) available, along with a basic little 'Notification' class that can be used for customizable blobs of text. The idea here is that you can set notifications to have a prefix if you'd like, which you could then filter in your client to ensure bboard notifications, finger output, WHO output, etc. doesn't end up in your scene logs.

I'd be curious if people think this is more approachable.

The repo's at https://github.com/Packetdancer/evennia-sandbox

@tehom The more I think about it, the more I think a sandbox game with existing code and then a tutorial that walks through a change to that code—like you had suggested earlier in the thread—might really be the better way to go for a starting thing. Because the tutorial, while it's better than nothing, is really covering way too much all at once.

@griatch said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

• If you want to do line-by-line explanation of a code (beyond normal code-comments), I think it's usually better to explain the lines in text after the code - as you yourself note, long inline code is making the whole thing look very overwhelming when in fact it's just a few lines of actual code. If it's hard to track, I'd suggest to use after-line comments with, say numbers (# 5) and refer to them in the text afterwards.

Hrm. Fair point. Though I admit, I'm starting to think more and more that a sample game with inline comments (albeit less comprehensive) and a tutorial on changing that existing code might be better than a tutorial that starts from scratch and doesn't have a convenient file to follow along with.

• All of these aspects (commands, command sets, locks etc) have more detailed explanations in the Evennia manual. You can't be expected to explain the full depth in this tutorial so it's a a good idea to add links to those for people to conveniently dive deeper if they want.

Yeah, I definitely should scatter a few more links throughout. I just need to find the right ones.

• 'Python is not 'just' a "functional programming language". It's very much an object-oriented language (supporting functional paradigms). While that distinction may not matter to complete newbies, it may throw newcomers with no Python knowledge but general programming knowledge for a loop.

This is true, and I probably should clarify it (and maybe cover a little of the basics of what object-oriented programming languages even are for those who don't have basic programming knowledge).

• When you use the @set command for the first time it would be good to explain why that now works and refer to the place above where the Attribute is set up (it's mentioned in the in-code comment but reading the text it feels like the @set comes out of nowhere).

That one worries me less, because MUSHers are already familiar with @set to set attributes. But it's still a fair point.

• It's not recommended to use filter (nor map) in modern Python code. These can always be written using a list comprehension, without any lambdas:

I admit this one was a conscious choice to go against the grain. I chose to use a lambda there because I'd already explained lambdas in the sorted example, and I didn't really want to write a section on list comprehension too, since I worried about confusing people with too many concepts in short order.

You're probably correct, though, that it makes more sense to just bite the bullet and add the explanation, since it is the better way to do it.

@tehom said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

@sparks said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

Okay, here's a question. Instead of trying to write a really verbose tutorial like the half-done one I linked before, would it be easier for folks if there was just a really basic Evennia-in-a-box that provided some nice basic systems, like a bboard system, a mail system, and so on? (If the systems were really well commented in the source code, I mean. Commented on the level of that last code listing in the tutorial.)

Because writing the tutorial is slow and kind of painful as I try to think what I need to explain, while just writing the code would be much faster.

I personally feel that'd be the way to go. I think learning coding as you go via modifying existing features is much less intimidating than trying to implement them yourself, and tutorials would probably feel less daunting if they're more along the lines of 'Add a character's signature to their mail' than 'Create a simple version of a mail command'.

Maybe I'll just finish the WHO command tutorial since it's now maybe two-thirds done anyway, and then just make a basic out-of-box game someone could use. I do have what the final WHO command source will be, with copious—perhaps excessive—comments. (I don't know that I could do an entire example game with that many comments, especially since it looks much more legible without.)

Edit: And, the tutorial's done!

Okay, here's a question. Instead of trying to write a really verbose tutorial like the half-done one I linked before, would it be easier for folks if there was just a really basic Evennia-in-a-box that provided some nice basic systems, like a bboard system, a mail system, and so on? (If the systems were really well commented in the source code, I mean. Commented on the level of that last code listing in the tutorial.)

Because writing the tutorial is slow and kind of painful as I try to think what I need to explain, while just writing the code would be much faster.

@pyrephox said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

@sparks Remember that it doesn't have to be the BEST resource. Just one that lets the prospective coder (who, remember, maybe doesn't actually enjoy coding, but just wants something functional enough to do what they do enjoy, i.e. design the game) fumble their way through something that works.

I added some links and more verbose comments to the (currently) final source example, which I desperately hope helps.

@pyrephox said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

@sparks Links, maybe?

Like, when you mention classes, maybe a link to another resource that explains what classes are. I know there are plenty out there, and people might be more willing to just go, "Hm, don't know what that word means, let me click" than to Google it for themselves. I know it would help me!

Uuuugh. Yeah, that's probably the best path, but it's such a pain finding a really good one to link to.

Well, it's very hard to know how far down you need to go.

I've begun working on a very basic "how to write an Evennia command" tutorial draft for MUSHcoders, who aren't experienced Python users, and I try to explain Pythonic concepts in it, but it's hard for me to know what people don't know—and it's hard not to make everything verbose and overwhelming if I include everything. Like, do I also need to include a definition of what a "class" is and a summary of object-oriented programming at the beginning? How far down do I go in my explanations?

It's tricky to find the right balance.

@pyrephox said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

@sparks For me personally, I'd love to see how a system like Arx's clue system is made. (Just the displaying/tracking/sharing, not the automated investigation system, etc.) I don't know if that would be too complex for the tutorial, but it fascinates me.

Actually, if it's just storage and display/tracking/sharing, it might be too simple for the tutorial; that's actually pretty straightforward. It'd certainly be an easy tutorial to write, and it would cover Django models, commands, and you could even go the extra stretch and make a web-based knowledge viewer in the tutorial like how I made the clue notebooks for the Arx website.

@pyrephox said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

@sparks This would be incredibly helpful.

Out of curiosity, what sort of system do you (or anyone else who's chiming in on this thread) think would be most useful as a tutorial like that?

@griatch oh, interesting! You're coming at it from the angle of forum software that can be accessed from the game; I came at it from the angle of at least replicating MUSH +bboard functionality and then making it accessible on the web. This is why you can write posts with Evennia ANSI colors on game, but not have italics and bold and embedded images on the web. (And why I honestly never considered avatars.)

I wonder, in hindsight, if taking an existing minimalist Django forum and trying to add some basic access on-game would've been the better approach, if folks expect the feature-set driven by the web side. (Though I suspect it would have been a less useful learning experience.)

I do think, to get us back to the other part of the thread topic, that it might be useful to write a single self-contained system, something like Paxboards, and write up a tutorial that goes over writing that system, so people can follow along. Something with commands, models, and views, which will give you experience with pretty much all the major stuff not really covered right now. Doing that whole system as my first project really helped me learn Evennia as a developer.

@griatch (and anyone else); I'm very open to suggestions for what Paxboards should look like as a final thing. I'd love to flesh out out more to where people can use it easily and have it suit their needs.

@tehom said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:

I think the two major pain points are not having some common features out of the box that people need to implement themselves, like bulletin boards, and the difficulty in installation/configuration.

I really should clean up Paxboards a bit and put it into contrib or something.

While I think the 'getting started' guide is great, it's still not a trivial matter for people who are new to python or otherwise uncomfortable with setting up an environment.

I tried to write a very simple 'getting started' for a friend, for both Ubuntu (and the Ubuntu support layer on Windows) as well as macOS; I don't know if it's actually any more useful, but I'd happily contribute those as a baseline someone can use.

@cobaltasaurus said in Development Thread: Sacred Seed:

I don't think taking a part someone's code will help me-- at least not at this stage in my learning. However, I have paid for through the humblebundle a bunch of python video tutorials, and once I get a droth of freelance work that's due tomorrow at 6pm CT (eep) done, I'll go back to those, and then maybe poke @griath or @Tehom to perhaps walk me through building a +Who for Sacred Seed.

I will happily sit down with you to help with writing a WHO command (once I'm back from my writing conference).