Posts made by Sparks

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

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

It later emerged that sharing clues should actually be more like a thesis defense; it's not just "here's the information" but "here's the information, all the footnotes, three primary sources, and why I believe this is accurate". Given that, limiting how much can be shared at once makes perfect sense.

I'm confused by this statement, because it didn't look like anyone was advocating not sharing as much as possible (though it appears some may be hoarding information). Can you elaborate?

Several folks were saying that they were disappointed at how widely a lot of the early game information had spread among the playerbase—i.e., how many people had @clues. Because they'd like to hold a piece of knowledge close, and not have it spread widely.

My explanation was that early on in the game (where by "early on" I mean "last September and October") there was both a push that "characters will need to work together to figure out what's ahead" and a belief—a misunderstanding, as it turns out—that @clues were meant to represent "I know this", not "I have solid evidence for this". That difference is kind of crucial; it's the difference between "I was told X" (or "I read X on Facebook" in modern terms) versus "I know X, and here's citations on where all the information comes from to back this claim up".

But when people believed @clues were meant for staff to track who'd been told of a given thing ICly, lots of players were still actively running around scrambling to figure out the shape of the metaplot—and the coming threats, which were hinted at but nebulous—and so were sharing @clues willy-nilly as topics were discussed.

Hence why there are crazy people out there who have 150 @clues (and who will likely be eaten by an archfiend who doesn't approve of higher esoteric education).

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

I was surprised at the spread of info too. I was treating each clue as a precious secret and only sharing with like one or two people at most and only if I felt they needed to know. Then I realized people were basically holding classes where info was committed at participants.

I think part of the problem is that originally a lot of players believed @clues were very much just "you know this thing". A way to track who knew what bits of lore, and so if you discussed the thing, the @clue should be shared. And the staff had very much encouraged people to spread secrets and plot around; there was initially a lot of "you'll only be able to learn what's going on and figure out how to deal with it if you share information and work together", a lot of people—me included—shared @clues around as we discussed topics with people.

It later emerged that sharing clues should actually be more like a thesis defense; it's not just "here's the information" but "here's the information, all the footnotes, three primary sources, and why I believe this is accurate". Given that, limiting how much can be shared at once makes perfect sense.

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

I think a little more traitor element would help here, like in cooperative board games with potential traitor mechanics. Maybe have some agents of Fable amongst the PCs. Give them a clue and suddenly you forget all about it or maybe you start getting hunted down.

I don't think they'd want PC agents of Fable since they've said they really want the game to not be PvP, and that would be a pretty PvP element. However, many of the folks who did get a lot of clues now apparently are being actively watched/hunted by Fable. And staff's said there's a very real chance the afflicted individuals will meet untimely ends; as Apos evidently told several folks, "This is meant to mean 'grue incoming, you may be eaten'."

@Thenomain said in RL Anger:

I wrote this code yesterday. It works. I can no longer figure out why it works.

One of my earliest code projects, with my best friend when we were kids... we had a naming scheme for our global variables. (This being in BASIC, where you had very strict naming schemes for variables.) We discovered if we assigned a value to one of these global variables, it would break the program.

We searched the entire codebase, and confirmed we had never used that particular variable anywhere else. And yet, assigning a value to it anywhere caused the program to fail.

We finally just added comments declaring the variable 'the God variable' and not to be touched, and moved on with our lives.

I'll probably put Lua scripting in still, yes.

As for reducing the scrollback buffer size, just go to a given spawn and where it has 'Max Lines' in the settings, change it from '0' (unlimited) to '1000' or something.

@Thenomain said in Mac Client Recommendations?:

@Sparks

'you want one input area? You want six input areas? Whatever! Just enter a number!'

You want used electronics? You want broken electronics? Come to Manolios Ugly One's Lectro-pawn.

"Khajiit has input windows, if you have coin."

@surreality said in RL Anger:

This. Be there. Be there in more but body as much as you can, and if you can't be there in body be on the phone or texts or skype or something else. Be engaged. Do things with her as much as possible in that time.

My mother failed hard on this with me and it's something I struggle with. (While her daughter was dying according to the docs, my mother was reading a book and ignoring me, and crying over a character in the book dying and ignoring my attempts to talk with her or watch something fun with her and so on. DO NOT BE MY MOTHER. I am a pretty forgiving person but that one will take a while...)

Ironically, my mother's made it pretty clear that at least right now, she wants the opposite of engagement; she wants the presence more than attention, at least at this stage of things. She wants people there and reading while she reads, or watching TV with her, etc. (She's gotten on my dad's case a bit about him not letting her just read or play Solitaire on her computer, but wanting to sit and talk or something instead.)

I think everyone has different ways of coping with recovery. Though I expect once she's recovered from the surgery and the chemo starts, her feelings on this may change.

@Auspice said in Mac Client Recommendations?:

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Mac Client Recommendations?:

@faraday said in Mac Client Recommendations?:

Most people I know use it to compose a pose while simultaneously carrying on a page or channel convo. I've always been so accustomed to just using the clipboard as a copy/paste buffer that even when I've used Potato on occasion I haven't found myself utilizing the dual-input window. But maybe it's something you get used to over time.

This is primarily what I use it for and I find it a lot more helpful than I did in the beginning. Channel convo I can just let scroll and whatever, but sometimes there are pages I feel like I should respond to right away. I also use it as a quick reference to bbposts or character finger info while writing. Even when I tried to save poses by copy/pasting, if you aren't vigilant about it every time, they're just gone. And recreating poses, much like copy/pasting hyperlinks from SimpleMU because it fucks up links, is a PITA I wasn't entirely aware I hated until I no longer had to deal with it.

Much of this. When I'm running a scene, it's nice to be able to draft and edit and update my poses while also keeping an eye on the scene itself, answering questions, etc.

I lose way too many poses to copying to the clipboard... and then getting distracted just long enough to copy something else.

I've done this more than once. I'll admit, it's part of why I have one of those Clipboard helpers (which keeps the last 15 things I've copied), and my old workaround was just to paste it into the input of a spawn window.

But I too have done this, especially when GM'ing, to the point I usually just have Sublime Text open to write the next GM emit. Which is, yes, why A2 has the 'you want one input area? You want six input areas? Whatever! Just enter a number!' functionality in the current prototype.

@Ping said in Mac Client Recommendations?:

@Sparks said in Mac Client Recommendations?:

I'd need to see more of the crash log information, I'm afraid. I'm also on Sierra and haven't had that problem.

When it crashes it brings up a dialogue box with a little ladybug (crash reporter?) And -says- it's "generating a crash report" but then that just quits out after a second or two, and nothing appears to be generated. Is there some other way to obtain that information? I am not sure where these logs might be getting saved.

Yeah, sadly my little ladybug helper doesn't work right on Sierra.

However, crash logs can be found in ~/Library/Application Support/CrashReporter, and you'll find a datafile there for an Atlantis crash, a binary plist. You can try to send that to me. But your crash log below is sufficient; the crash is just because your machine ran out of memory.

(Atlantis 1.0 had a serious memory issue if you gave it infinite scrollback buffers—the default, I'm afraid—and left it running for weeks.)

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.

@Catsmeow said in RL Anger:

My friend passed away from her fight with cancer this morning.

Fuck cancer.

I'm so, so sorry. Though I doubt any words can make it better.

But that's my own great terror right now. My mother was diagnosed with stage 3 peritoneal carcinomatosis literally two weeks ago. Bad enough they rushed her into surgery to remove what they could less than a week after the diagnosis.

Now we're looking at weeks of recovery from that surgery, followed by months and months of chemotherapy.

And I hate—hate—that there's nothing really I can do about it. I can try to be there for my mother, but nothing I can do that will likely have a measurable impact on her ability to pull through this.

So you have my heartfelt sympathy.

@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.

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

@icanbeyourmuse It now warns you if you try it. If there's an +event already at 18:00, even if it's private and you're not invited, and you try to set an +event at 17:00 it'll let you know.

Oh, that's nice! Tonight's event was the second time that's happened to me.

@Ping I'd need to see more of the crash log information, I'm afraid. I'm also on Sierra and haven't had that problem.

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

@Arkandel I can tell you that Ashford has several super cool players! I haven't played with the newest Harlan (head of the house) but I can tell you that Aislin, Cara, and Killian are all good folk.

Aw, thank you. We try!

(I'm feeling a little bad, though; I haven't had a chance to throw as many RP hooks as I usually do to Rainier or Maude yet. I've been digging through Aislin's scene backlog.)

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

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

@Kanye-Qwest Nah. She types better than Apostate.

i dno't know waht you're tlaking abuot.

See, I would've said "I kan typ gud" there. Totally different people!

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

@Sparks If you play who I think you play, your efforts to spread the love have been successful and very appreciated!

Thanks! I've tried. Sadly, this week I'm stuck on a business trip (which proooobably confirms who I'm playing), and that means I'm sitting on several bits of information I got Sunday evening and haven't yet had a chance to scatter to the winds.

I'm looking forward to getting home and having time to get back into things!

@lordbelh said:

At this point in the game the people who can shine are the ones who can dig into the lore of the world, and the ones who can be social. That leaves the explorers and the soldier types somewhat threading water for the time being. I'm sure other concepts, too.

But I do know that the whole dynamic exploration ideas is going to offer something to both sorts.

I'm going to chime in here for a moment. As someone playing one of the more exploration-focused characters I found on the roster (basically, I ended up playing Lara Croft), I've actually had good luck asking the staff for tidbits.

Like, I can't run out and explore things yet. But if a chunk of lore comes up, I can go, "Hey, staff. People are talking about <thing X>. Have I seen anything in my explorations that would relate to this thing?" And certainly sometimes the answer has been "no", but sometimes the answer is "yes, and <insert infodump here>." I've actually been handed a fair amount of information this way, which I then try to run around and spread out, to seed other people looking into things.

(Admittedly, I don't know how successful I've been at that last part, but I've at least tried to make a point to find excuses to spread info and stuff around with people other than my core RP group.)

So if you can think of something you could do ICly that's hard to do right now OOCly due to a lack of an appropriate system, I highly recommend putting in a +request with details just to see if there's some information you could be handed. I.e.., if you don't have investigation, using the investigation system is going to be a little bit painful, but maybe you're a merchant and think you could try to get information about <topic X> from traveling merchant NPCs you do a lot of business with. It might take them a couple of days to get to, but in my experience they may well give you a clue or tidbit of information about current things.

Hey, why not, I'll toss a few in as well.

FNZAZMEYD6F - Expires November 8
NYVHF5BMR3N - Expires December 8
89VTW5SWH6J - Expires January 10

@Glitch said:

@Roz I'm just floored at the number of spawns you've got going. It does look easy to read and understand at a glance, but man... isn't there a lot of clicking involved, going back and forth between all of those?

I should add to Roz's comment that you can bind a hotkey sequence to any individual spawn in Atlantis. So I not only can use the default 'move to next spawn with activity' key, but I can have keys to move me to specific oft-used spawns (or the main spawn for a given world) without having to click.

There isn't really one for my option, either. For the most part, I spawn things into a single window a'la Roz's screenshot (which will surprise no one given that I wrote the client in question).

But as background, each spawn in Roz's screenshot could be pulled out and dropped on the desktop to make a new window, or dropped into another Atlantis window to dock it there. Further, for windows with a single spawn, you can collapse the list entirely if you choose.

So, during GM'd plots or such I will often take the plot or group-scene channel—the ones used to keep OOC chatter to a minimum on most games I'm on—and rip the appropriate spawn out of the main window, turning it into its own standalone window and collapsing it down smaller beside the main one, so I can see GM chatter without having it clutter up my main RP window AND without having to switch spawns to read it.