@Jaded said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@Sparks This is the first game I encountered ascii desces in a weapon or item. I find that...strange, actually. So I would not expect ascii art. Just...a good desc.
Well, there's also +shop, where you can walk into a crafter's shop, bring the materials—in the case of a sword, for instance, that's four ingots of whatever material—and provide the desc yourself, but get to use the crafter's dice. 
I haven't had a chance to really dig in yet, but every scene I've had—even the one where I completely blew my piloting quals—has been enjoyable so far. Everyone has been welcoming and fairly understanding as I try to catch up and settle in, despite having joined right as my RL work is exploding a little bit.
And I really do like Ares as a server in a lot of ways.
@Tempest said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
People expecting crafters to make awesome descs is just part of the culture, dating back to Firan.
Usually you weren't paying a crafter to make whatever they're making. You were paying them to throw a sick ASCII dragon in the desc (or whatever).
If you didn't actually do descs, you tended to not get business as a crafter.
Yeah, I played a weaponsmith on Firan, too—Chinnon Sokairik—so I knew what I was in for in that sense. And I actually enjoy crafting.
But I do need to encourage people to use +shop more.
@Kanye-Qwest said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
So make people desc their own, in shops! that was a key tenet of the shop design.
I try!! People say that, no, they were really hoping for a custom piece that would surprise them. And I do like seeing people happy when they receive them. I need to learn to say "no" better.
@Jaded - I'm Hana, for my smith. I run the Storied Blade, and I'm presently underwater on commissions.
@Jaded said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
Arx has some good openings for crafters. Particularly weaponsmiths and leatherworkers.
For the love of all thirteen gods, more weaponsmiths. I swear I am the only active one, and I am getting kind of burned out on descing. Help!
@Cupcake said in Spawns and How You Use Them:
If anyone knows how to make spawns with MUSHClient, a step-by-step guide would be super helpful.
@Rook nah, I use Windows, Linux, and OSX interchangeably. I wrote Atlantis because I happened to be stuck on a Mac almost exclusively for a while when my PC was broken, and sorely missed SimpleMU. When I was unable to convince Kath to port it, I started writing my own.
However, writing a cross platform client that does all of what I want to do with Atlantis is something of a pain; what I want to do is simply easier on OSX, even with the clean rewrite for A2. Sorry. 
Just a few days ago, my friend was talking confidently about the new treatment plan for her cancer.
She passed away yesterday.
Fuck cancer.
Fuck cancer, indeed. 
@Rook said in Spawns and How You Use Them:
When coding, I tend to 'shut down' on the Coder bit, but be active on another bit to chat, talk, answer questions. I got fed up with Spawns constantly distracting me when in that heads-down mode, but they were great at all other times.
So, one thing I've been considering is making spawns less 'concrete', so you can stick them together to view everything or retroactively turn them on and alter scrollback, etc. It sounds to me like that could work nicely for you, so that you could turn off spawns when in 'heads down', and have everything slip into a single thing, but turn it back on with a single click when done Heads Down Mode.
@faraday said in Spawns and How You Use Them:
I'd be curious to try out having a chat window at the bottom with poses at the top. Not sure if I'd like it so not a big deal or anything though. Random kudos: I love Atlantis!
This actually could be done in A2, if I expose the functionality. See, A2's new spawn/windowing system isn't just "here is a spawn, and a window of them" but rather made up of several things.
A window contains 'pages' (think of them like spawns; that's what they're still called when exposed to the user) and an 'index' (the normal spawn visualizer lists). But unlike A1, a spawn isn't just a monolithic block. Pages have a 'layout', and that layout contains 'blocks'. Output window is a 'block'. Input window is a block. World info is a block.
Right now, programmatically, it's easy in A2 for me to go, 'instanciate a new input block, and add it to this page' and have the layout account for it automatically. So it wouldn't be hard to make something where the spawn had two output blocks.
Atlantis 1, internally, was basically 'client construction kit'. Atlantis 2, internally, will be even moreso; once it's done, it should be easy to design new styles of spawns and new types of content blocks.
@faraday I can certainly do that, but you can actually turn that mode off and bind specific keys to specific spawns. Like, for me, Command-0 is always my testbed world, Command-1 is always Orianne@XFNYC, Command-3 is always Aislin@Arx, Command-Shift-3 is Aislin's 'Faction' window, Command-4 is Hallie@BSGU, etc. Sadly, the hotkey configuration UI doesn't show things quite right under El Cap, because for whatever reason the library I used works perfectly well but just doesn't return a Unicode string describing a key sequence any longer. Another reason to finish A2...
@EMDA Atlantis actually supports that inasmuch as you can rip any spawn out of its window and into another. You could emulate this pretty easily by using the 'tab bar' style, ripping all the spawns out of one window and into another, and then just sticking that window next to the first one. I could certainly make it support docked-in chunks like that in A2, though.
That wouldn't be too hard. I'll make a 'multi line tab' option for A2 as I flesh things out.
@Auspice I can do something like that in A2, but how would you want it visualized? Just a list of spawns in that world alongside the input window? Or two tab bars, where one of them is the world and the other is the spawns within it?
Actually, as background for those not familiar with Atlantis 1.0, I should detail how spawns have worked there traditionally.
Every spawn in Atlantis has a content view (usually an output area and an input area, but there was a special-case 'Notepad' spawn per-world you could pop up as well). Every spawn also has a colon-delimited 'path', like: Charbit@Game:Faction or Staffer@Game2:Staff:Coders
Every 'window' is made up of a list of these spawns, along with a spawn style visualizer. The visualizer is responsible for drawing spawns in some style; it might be my beloved 'tree' of spawns, like:
Where if 'Staffstuff' and 'Spam' are just points on a path and not actual spawns in their own right, they're unselectable folders that can be closed/open to show or hide spawns.
But another visualization in A1 is tabs, where it would sort it like:
[Charbit@Game] [Faction] [Movies] [Comics] [Politics] [Staffbit@Game2] [Public] [Wizards] [Coders] [Help]
...in effect, collapsing the tree into a single line of tabs.
And of course, spawns can be ripped off into their own windows, docked into other windows, and so on.
So, as I poke a bit more at Atlantis 2.0, trying to make the new spawn engine even more flexible, I'm considering different types of spawn visualizations. And I'm curious how people who use spawns... well, use spawns. And how they'd like to use them, in an ideal world.
I've been considering a group-by-world option, as well as the ability to have 'virtual' spawns that contain the contents of several other spawns together, properly sorted by time. But I'm curious how useful that would be for people.
@Apos said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
I definitely appreciate the concern. Now I think the thing that counteracts it most there is that there's no limit on the number of people helping in an investigation, and they all make a significant difference in the rate something is finished. Right now, most investigations are really done by teams of people- some people do slowly gain things on their own, especially if they are stated for it, but it's difficult enough where most people aren't really like, 'oh I'll just do this alone with my retainer bob' since the threshold is so high, I usually see it like 4 PCs and 2 retainers helping out in one big thing as a team, rather than a bunch of smaller ones.
To add to what Apostate says, my largest investigation was one involving thirteen PCs all pushing to the same goal for half a month, as a culmination of two other investigations (each with 5 or 6 folks on them) and a crisis action which, together, gave us enough info to know what to look for. As a whole, it was about 2.5 RL months of work for a lot of people. And as a result, we retrieved the lost ritual that allowed the paladins to be empowered.
There was zero chance I could've done that on my own if for some reason I hadn't wanted to involve others.
@Pyrephox said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@Roz The idea that anyone is even able to contemplate getting level 6 skills is, in itself, crazy to me, and a sign that maaaaybe XP has gotten out of hand.
No, see...
There's no way I'm getting a level 6 skill. But I can xp/cost to see what it would cost me.
So, a level 6 skill on Aislin would cost 1966xp. I will never be able to save that up. But I thus know, because the base cost is 1000, that my XP tax is 96.6%. Meaning I have enough skills that every skill I get costs me 196.6% of the base cost. A 10xp skill would cost me 20xp (19.66 rounds up). Etc.
Conversely, Hana is not a jack of all trades. A level 6 skill on her would cost me only 1000xp according to xp/cost, meaning she has no XP tax. (Not surprising; she's very focused on smithing, so has far fewer skills than Aislin.)
That's how people talk about level 6 XP costs.
I don't know anyone who has seriously even considered buying level 6, much less who could do it without saving up for like 7-12 months of spending XP on nothing.
If I didn't already have a Grayson fealty alt, I'd certainly consider a Deepwood. Sam and her crew are good people!
@Apos said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
I think 4 people at the siege battles would have died if we were using current code, so be a little careful there.
I am now wildly curious who those four were, I admit. (I'm certain one was Tikva, who I saw go unconscious twice.)
@surreality said in RL Anger:
If, for some reason, I want to see 3D, IMAX 3D is the only one I can see without intense migraines (or was, prior to this current migraine misery I'm experiencing).
...holy crap, I thought I was the only person this happens to. (I had always thought it would be worse, but it's so much less evil for some reason.)
No, this is common for migraine sufferers, as Auspice said.