Posts made by Sparks

@apos said in Silly things you'd been tempted to do on/for a MU*:

Characters that speak only in rhyme, meter, with a specific literary device, or only using grandiloquent phrasing. It's easy to fall in that from like having a few hour scene where every pose is only in alliteration or whatever, and then it's like, 'hey I bet I could make a character that only does...' no, don't.

Do you wanna make a cliché?
Do you wanna drive them mad?
Speak in only song, it cannot go wrong!
(This idea's quite bad!)

@arkandel said in RL Anger:

Everyone in my company is using whitespace instead of tabs. They are monsters, and I am surrounded by them.

Plz send help.

Four space indentation or death. This is the hill I die on.

(I kid. Mostly.)

My mother's cancer may be coming back already. We don't know yet; she had tests done last week, and we get the results back tomorrow. And as a result I'm too nervous to sleep well tonight.

And simultaneously, one of my childhood best friends just had his son—his very young son—diagnosed with leukemia.

As was said: another round of "fuck cancer".

@arkandel said in RL things I love:

I don't know how RL this is, but there might be an actual table-top RPG group in my near future - yes, it's 5th Ed D&D, but nothing's perfect.

Actually, 5e comes pretty close! It's one of the best balances of crunchy math to story when run right, in my opinion.

(Plus, you only need watch Critical Role to see how good a good GM can make it.)

I hope you enjoy!

@thenomain said in A directory of MU*'s that's actually good:

@sparks

MUML?

Out of technical ignorance I ask: Why not MSSP?

MSSP allows you to get the status of a game once you know its host/port in order to connect to it and issue the INFO command. The Evennia/Ares lists give you a convenient list of games, websites... and host/ports, which you could then use with MSSP. The one dovetails nicely into the other.

Basically, the Evennia list only shows Evennia games, the Ares list only shows Ares games, and since they're meant to be sort of server advertisements—"come look here for what you can do with this system"—that makes sense. But you could export those lists and use them to seed a combined list of RP-focused games, akin to Mudconnector but specific to RP rather than combat games. Similarly, you could use MSSP to move things to 'dead' and take them out of the active list when they stopped responding for a week (or if they had only =<1 people on for all samples for a month, or something).

What would be awesome is if Ares and Evennia both supported exporting their world lists in a standardized JSON or XML format from a given endpoint.

Then someone who wanted to make a new listing site could a) pull from the Ares and Evennia lists as at least a baseline for 'here are some games', and b) export their own site listing in that same format, so that c) clients or third-party tools could import it too.

@tanyuu said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

I honestly think that MU* s could offer something new to RPers who are looking for something lightweight, especially on tablets and phones. It doesn't need constant attention, it doesn't need a specific console or computer, and/or your internet access is limited or spotty, MU* s are great. Telnet seems to connect okay, but I've never tried to stretch it beyond 'connecting in to chat while cooking'.

This is another reason I think web access—specifically, web access designed natively for the web, not just a SimpleMU-esque client running in a browser—has a significant benefit. On an Ares game or an Evennia game with web-enabled bboards, I can read boards and emits and such from my phone or tablet easily, without having to log in. If I'm somewhere with spotty connectivity, engaging in a scene is all but impossible, but I can at least catch up on bboards and all.

If I could actually engage in scenes readily from a pure-web interface like that, I might actually try RP'ing (from a tablet with a keyboard, at least) the next time I'm on an airplane headed somewhere. In-flight WiFi is terrible and I've often been disconnected from a stateful link like telnet, but something like Faraday's pure-web prototype with scenes played from on the web? That would work great while I'm on airline wifi. If the link hiccups, I still see the poses the next time I reload the page, etc.

@ashen-shugar said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

@sparks said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

@bored said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

Arguments over telnet and whatever ill it does or doesn't do aside, I think there's probably at least some kind of general feeling that a modernized web version would do a lot if it could do it without totally jettisoning our more advanced text-land backend stuff. This is the route that both Ares and Evennia are taking, where you have both the text interface and a web portal, so... I dunno why anyone has a problem with that?

Because it does require duplicating a good chunk of the work if you want more than a basic web version of a normal client. Your bboards need two front-ends—one that runs in the traditional plain-text telnet interface, and one that works like a web forum. Your mail program needs two front-ends, one that works in the traditional plaintext and one webmail style. Etc.

It is basically duplication of all your UX; if you do everything just on the web, it quite literally cuts the effort in half.

Not... entirely.

The interface will have to, naturally, be coded differently, but the actual data, the formatting, the functionality and various base generalizations will apply to both (or however many) interfaces you toss at it.

At least it should if you code the back-end properly.

If you have your telnet interface, then you have your web interface, and both require a near complete rewrite to get to the exact same data?

I'm sorry, but your design sucks and you need to re-think it.

Yes, but I specifically said front-end. You're explicitly talking about sharing the back-end, and I don't disagree with you there.

The code that says 'give me a list of boards' and 'give me a list of posts' and 'give me the data about this post' can—and should—be shared between both; you'll find I've argued for designing systems precisely this way before, and built my boards, mail, and other prototyped systems for Evennia that way.

But even if the backend is shared between both, you will be able to share very little code between a UI layer atop that which presents it a'la Myrddin's bboard, and a UI layer atop that which presents the same data in nodebb format a'la these forums. And if you write code that just, for instance, presents a Myrddin bboard in html form as a clickable list otherwise indistinguishable from the on-game format, I'd argue you're not taking full advantage of the web format.

You're completely right on the backend side, but I stand by my statement here that most of the front-end UI work needs to be duplicated if you're going to really take advantage of the web. And if the question is why people would want web-only instead of web-and-telnet-both with everything presented in two formats, that duplication of work is the reason I've seen some people balk at that design.

@bored said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

Arguments over telnet and whatever ill it does or doesn't do aside, I think there's probably at least some kind of general feeling that a modernized web version would do a lot if it could do it without totally jettisoning our more advanced text-land backend stuff. This is the route that both Ares and Evennia are taking, where you have both the text interface and a web portal, so... I dunno why anyone has a problem with that?

Because it does require duplicating a good chunk of the work if you want more than a basic web version of a normal client. Your bboards need two front-ends—one that runs in the traditional plain-text telnet interface, and one that works like a web forum. Your mail program needs two front-ends, one that works in the traditional plaintext and one webmail style. Etc.

It is basically duplication of all your UX; if you do everything just on the web, it quite literally cuts the effort in half.

@thenomain said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

@sparks said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

Everyone's already used to using the web browser for wiki

For using, yes. For coding, no. And this is something that we're slowly going toward. Evennia and Ares require a shift in how we code.

Well, I don't feel the same interface you use to play should be the same interface you use to code, honestly. (Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by this? I grant I may be.)

I mean, to my mind, one of the best things about Evennia or Ares is that I can use real development tools. I would argue that being able to use PyCharm or RubyMine as an IDE and step debug my code in an actual honest to god debugger is an immense step forward compared to setting an object TRACE, VERBOSE, and PUPPET and letting the spam wash over me.

And moreover, coding separately from the game interface frankly encourages a sandbox rather than just changing the game live; I can have my game in github or bitbucket or gitlab, make changes and try them on my local sandbox copy, find they work, push it to git, pull it on production, and reload the game. If something goes horribly wrong, I can relatively easily roll it back through the magic of source control.

@faraday said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

@Alzie - You're splitting hairs. I could implement a sophisticated communications protocol over an 8-bit serial bus too if I really wanted to but that would be supremely silly from a technical standpoint. Especially when standard web protocols do everything we need already.

The server-client protocol isn't even the biggest hangup, it's the MUSH clients. Maybe you expect somebody to invent new cross-platform MUSH clients across windows/mac/seventeen-flavors-of-mobile, but I don't. So what you're dubbing technically possible I say is largely impractical.

Moreover, people will not change from their current clients. I see people complain about how SimpleMU doesn't support https links and 256-color, but still refuse to change to Potato.

So even if you write a client that supports music and sound and graphics and VR—witness Pueblo—and even if it was available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, lots of people still won't switch to it because it's not the client they are used to using.

But everyone has a web browser already. Everyone's already used to using the web browser for wiki, for web forums, and so on. This is part of why web is pointed to as a low bar to entry for a new paradigm of MU*ing.

@arkandel said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

@griatch I think the issue here is that some clients handle command lines starting with / as internal commands instead of sending them as-is. Or that's my understanding - nothing done on the server side can fix that.

Yeah, Atlantis—like TinyFugue—passes / lines to a command/macro parser. I could make it so that instead of a "No such command" in the current for unknown commands it passes it on to the game, or I could just add /me as an internal command aliased to "pose".

@ganymede said in Mass Effect MU*?:

Because I really can't stop laughing about your idea. I mean, could you imagine a Hanar Maury Povich show?

I think you meant Elcor, but yes, that's brilliant.

(Though I can imagine the Hanar having a televangelist who wants to talk about the Enkindlers.)

@ganymede said in Mass Effect MU*?:

@sparks said in Mass Effect MU*?:

Resigned question: Does this mean no performance of Hamlet.

Drunken, effusive exclamation: Alas, poor Yorick.

I had a Mass Effect audio drama I was going to make with friends, set in C-Sec, and one of the running jokes was a really terrible news channel on the Citadel that one of the characters insisted on watching, where the news anchors were an elcor and a vorcha.

@ganymede said in Mass Effect MU*?:

Okay. None of the following:

• Elcor

Resigned question: Does this mean no performance of Hamlet.

@rook said in Alternative Formats to MU:

What is being discussed here is design for the server, not the protocol.

I think the idea is a server which is no longer beholden to telnet at all, which is why "telnet" is still a relevant term here.

The old Pueblo-enabled servers—and even Ares and Evennia, presently—have a design requirement that whatever they do must also be accessible via plain old boring text-only telnet. Thus even in that world, telnet is still a consideration in everything you design; everything has to be accessible to that lowest common denominator. You can't make channels work solely like Slack or Discord, because you still need to be able to interact with them via telnet in SimpleMU. You can't even make those channels support multi-line text cleanly (something you can do in, say, Slack or Discord), because you still need to be able to spawn them on old legacy clients, and only the first line would be slurped into a spawn. Etc.

This also means that Evennia and Ares' web clients tend to look very like telnet, because that's the easiest way to support things.

A complete redesign—something that does away with the telnet requirement—is not constrained by those same limitations.

@glitch said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@sparks Right, but I'm talking about core. The essentials of what you get from a "base" install. I definitely think there should be system plugins for all the things.

So, I think 'core'/'base' install should include support for a plugin system with a catalog of plugins...

@glitch said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@tat I don't think combat resolution is right for a core component. Maybe some universal dice roller, but anything more is just getting in the way, imo.

I think you want a plugin system that works like Wordpress type plugins; there's a catalog of available plugins and you can pick one from an admin page that shows that catalog, and click 'Install'. That way, you can have a WoD chargen/conflict resolution system, or a Fate Core one, or FS3, or whatever else. Just pick it from the list of contributed plugins and click 'install', it installs, the server restarts, et voila. And now you have a shiny new web admin page for that chargen system, etc.

Honestly, I think that's another place things could be made more accessible; instead of "let me go out and find code on github and then go figure out how to install it", you just have a catalog of add-ons you can click, as well as a way to install ones that aren't in the catalog.

@auspice said in Alternative Formats to MU:

By and far, college kids aren't reading and writing like they used to. This is fact.

Except I've seen plenty of studies that say the reverse. Sunny even quotes one a step or two above. College kids aren't reading print books like they used to, but they read on iPad or iPhone or Kindle quite avidly.

We're standing around trying to design a new logo for an outdated product when they don't want the product to begin with. This is Marketing 101 and we are failing. If they want our product, they will find it, regardless.

Except, as Roz has pointed out, there are many demonstrably excellent RPers doing journal RP, Tumblr RP, forum RP, and so on. And as both Roz and I have experienced, if you point them at a MUSH, they go "Wait, I have to download a special program? Okay, how do I set this up. Okay, what's this +cg/adjust stuff I have to do? This is weird." and go back to the familiarity of something in a browser they already know how to use.

We mostly know how to use +bboard, though as Tat has pointed out, folks sometimes still have to check the particular syntax, especially for +bbnew, +bbsearch, etc. type commands that tend to be custom per-game. But you know what? Everyone pretty much knows how to use a web-forum when it comes to bboards.

The core of MU is roleplay. None of this enhances or speaks to that core. What would bring people in for roleplay? What are barriers to roleplay? It was brought up earlier, a few things:

People complain the hobby is dying. That we're RP'ing with the same people over and over again. That there's no new blood.

If we assume "there's no new blood" is a problem, and that new blood is something that infuses new life (and thus new RP) into the community, then making MU*ing more accessible to people absolutely enhances that core.

As was pointed out by several others already, T:L&F made a huge concerted effort to find RPers in those environments, to handhold them through the adjustment period, and get them into RP. As a result, it's a fairly large, active game with a lot of young newcomers to MU*ing.

Now, if you don't feel that the hobby needs new blood that's an entirely different matter. But it felt like that was one of the premises of this thread to start with, and the question was more "If this is true, how do we make it more approachable?"

• Difficult CGs (a web form only gives this a new interface; it doesn't make the core of CG easier)

I disagree completely, and I have my own personal anecdote to back it up.

I recently tried my first WoD MUSH. I found the chargen system impenetrable and confusing. And I'm an experienced MUSHer (and codestaffer!). But the chargen just... having never played WoD, much less used that particular chargen system, it felt alien and off-putting to me. I nearly gave up right there in chargen.

And then I realized, hey, I could make my character using the character sheet plugin in Roll20 and copy it over. And now I had something that did the math for me, which let me pick things and read the definitions from the books as I did so, etc. Suddenly making my character was a great deal easier.

Those are just a couple that have been brought up in this thread. Once people get past the 'shiny and new,' what's going to keep them around? It's not the bevel on the buttons. It's the roleplay and the people on the game.

But if they can't get through that initial push they're not going to be on the game in the first place to stick around.

@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@sparks said in Alternative Formats to MU:

A list of people presently online on the game, where you can click on one and have it open a private messaging conversation to them, is arguably a lot more intuitive to everyone who uses the internet than knowing you need to 'page <blah>=<foo>'. Everyone's used to being able to do that on Discord servers already, or Battle.net, or Steam, or Skype, or IRC, or whatever.

I am 99% sure that that feature alone would make these games immediately accessible to a wider audience. Clickable tool bar to bring up a collapsible who list/friends (watch) list, clickable conversations, and so on.

Heck, I think (as I'm sure everyone on this board is painfully aware by now) that even just putting your bboards on the website is a huge leap forward in usability; you can then read boards without logging in, you can read them without cluttering up your scene / logfile, etc. That's a UI change which immediately benefits even existing, experienced MU* users.

It's why the first thing I wrote for my Evennia game-in-a-box kit was a web-enabled forum system.