@Arkandel said:
I might be off-topic and please let me pointedly put my constructive hat on before I ask this, but here it is:
Is weather code useful for something?
It's another layer of ambiance. The fact that it's raining or windy can change lots of things about combat or just outdoor bar RP. It can be used or ignored.
https://github.com/AgentZombie/weather
Fetches data from US NWS, Parses the XML, gives you flat output that's easy to restructure.
$ go run bin/fetch.go --weatherurl http://www.weather.gov/xml/current_obs/KSAN.xml
Temperature: 74.0 F (23.3 C)
Wind: Northwest at 9.2 MPH (8 KT)
Pressure: 1014.2 mb
Dewpoint: 51.1 F (10.6 C)
Visibility: 10.00
Humidity: 45
Weather: A Few Clouds
If you don't feel confident setting up the go toolchain I can give you a binary. Note: you should never accept a binary from strangers.
For the sake of history, I'll explain how CoH's Risk system was intended to work.
I saw instances of staff there saying "If you do X it will force your risk level to 3" or "Y is a risk 3 action". This is nonsense since the only people who can actually enforce consequences are staff. When a character abuses a low risk level, the player needs to be dealt with. A player bent on abuse isn't going to be dissuaded by changes to their character.
As I stated in my CoH Post-Mortem, players mostly managed themselves with respect to risk. The majority of requests I saw during my tenure regarding risk were speculative. Specifically in the vein of "what can I get away with?" and "how can I be made to suffer?"
I still think the idea has merit but not quite how we initially wrote it.
That's a pretty clever way to get data from the filesystem into the game.
If the byte-wise location of the beginning of the help entry can change within the file, a wizard will have to @readcache to have the file reindexed. Similarly, if there's anything in the help file after the weather data a wizard will have to @readcache.
I have an almost-complete weather fetcher and formatter written in golang. I'll see if I can finish it in the next couple of days.
There are two things being discussed here, MediaWiki Skins (the overall look and feel of the site) and MediaWiki Templates (providing structure for individual pages).
I recently hacked up the Gamepress skin for New Prospect's player wiki. CSS is powerful and better than the stuff you used to have to do for web design. I'm not sure I prefer the problems it creates to the problems it solves.
I also started hacking up Loki's ubiquitous Charpage template to make something more flexible but less "plug and play". I made some other ones that do handy things.
For our main website I used dokuwiki. It's not nearly as powerful as MediaWiki but it's much simpler and the markup is more intuitive. My purpose for separating the two was to keep it obvious which information is official and which is player-maintained.
An alternative proposal: Federation.
Rather than having a single monolithic site that proposes to capture all of the community, provide a means for an arbitrary number of sites to be operate cohesively. This would require more work overall than a single site but has a number of advantages.
Given distinct sites, no one person can "take their toys and go home" or fail the bus test. Having distinct sites encourages competitive evolution and tailoring to specific audiences.
What does this look like? At a basic level sites need to be able to easily refer to content on other sites, characters, games, and other people. It should be possible to incorporate data from one site into another.
Off the cuff, the core of this would be federated identity for people and federated identity for games. For people this is Single Sign On, where individual sites can verify your identity in the vein of OpenID, Google/Facebook/Twitter, and OAuth2. Rather than having to sign in to each site, the identity of a player (or character) are validated by a profile site of the player's choosing. Information about games is provided by game registries which fetch the authoritative data from the games themselves.
Ideally, any site where data is generated exposes the public portions of that data in a machine-readable format like XML, JSON, or Protocol Buffers if you're nasty. All private data should be user-exportable. In both cases, sites handling similar data should be able to import that data. If a given forum is about to go tits-up, other forums should be able to slurp up the content and import it into their own sites. If I'm dissatisfied with how one site is handling my character profile or what they allow me to do, I should be able to export all my data and set it up at a site I prefer.
Roughly, this an extension of the idea of Diaspora* but going beyond content expressed in Markdown.
Full disclosure: I'm probably insane.
I'm an absolute moron for saying this out loud but I've long been dissatisfied with the delay and bureaucracy of getting things up on mudstats and mudconnect and am foolish enough to think I might do a better job without having tried to tackle the same problems before.
The ability to globally disable side-effect functions would be super-sweet.
@Luna Unless you do a ton of weird crafting or have a lot of little plastic car dashboard/console pieces or appliance nobs and buttons you're not going to save money with it or profit. For most people that have one it's a hobby and not the tool of a profession. When you get it dialed in it's tons of fun.
It also opens possibilities beyond printed plastic. You can easily print plastic things, finish them as desired. Then, you make a silicone mold and you can cast resins, chocolate, ice, anything not high-temp. If you're bout-it bout-it you can do sand-casting to make actual metal parts. I have a close friend who's collected pewter dragons since age 4 and I aspire to make some custom ones if I can ever get some 3D models I like for the purpose.
If anyone takes the plunge let me know. Your first enemy will be your longtime foe: First Layer Adhesion. I can save you some agony here.
@Luna said:
I just want to 3D print tiny unicorns. I want one so bad.
http://printrbot.com/shop/assembled-simple-metal/
$600. Filament's about $25/kg and falling. Don't get a kit to assemble yourself to save money if it's your first printer: they calibrate them after assembly which minimizes the chances of having to tear your hair out when it's not working properly.
For some people these things can go net profit really quickly. As big as cosplay has gotten (and to a lesser extent furry) the ability to make custom, one-of-a-kind costume parts can make for better product and demand higher prices.
The intention is what I'd describe as "compromise-based" rather than "consent-based". That said, I'm about to just state my vision of how consent works.
A situation begins where chance can be a factor. The players briefly discuss what kind of risks they see to their characters in the scene, then hash out what outcomes they're willing to consent to. The storyteller may indicate that certain risks are critical to the story. If one character isn't willing to accept those risks and the group can't work out the kind of compromises that @Orange and @Bobotron indicated it may not make sense for that player to participate. Once everyone can accept the worst case scenario, the dice decide outcome.
I like to believe that players are less risk-averse when they know they can set a limit on how much control they give up. When players indicate that they are unwilling to lose at all they self-identify as being limited to purely soft RP. When they fail to self-identify it can be disruptive for a scene or PRP but they probably won't be/shouldn't invited back for that kind of RP.
They key to it working is participants communicating expectations. I'm not aware of any problems so far but to be frank I don't feel like we've done well to establish this as a cultural norm.
3D printing is dope.
A sad amount of the printable models on the Internet are things for your 3D printer but it makes sense in the context of RepRap. There are also a lot of available models that aren't feasible on consumer printers unless you've spent the big bucks for an STL (e.g. Form1) printer. The bulk of the rest of the models are toys. Not having a kid this is of limited use.
It's currently really fiddly as a hobby. This is definitely not a turnkey technology. The pipeline from 3D model to physical object is entirely in one direction. Software converts a 3D model into instructions for the printer on how to move. "Move left 0.06mm, extrude 0.013mm of filament, move forward 0.02mm..." There's no feedback to indicate that everything is going according to plan. The part can become dislodged from the bed and the printer will continue merrily along, extruding molten plastic into free space. Or, you can run out of filament and the printer will keep going, oblivious.
However, pretty much any problem I can measure with calipers I can solve with the 3D printer, regardless of whether or not it's a good idea. I've made replacement parts for things, upgrades for things, and customized gifts for people.
Here's a project I've almost completed: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JasonMansfield/posts/jAbDh3zhYub
@Arkandel said:
Having a metaplot isn't really meant to be about giving people a shot to beat it. To me it mainly means giving characters the opportunity to hook their own stories into a common central theme and a source for plot seeds. It's a framework, not a goal meant to be resolved.
I've been thinking about having regular background metaplot on New Prospect. Given our stance on staff managing RP they would have to be limited to story seeds/hooks. The idea is write up sketches of events that are happening and describe the aspects apparent to each genre. Characters can ignore these as just something that's happening in the city while they focus on their day-to-day, but players can use it as inspiration for TPs.
In principle, this provides an optional framework for game-wide RP. I'm sure this isn't a novel idea and I'm wondering what kind of results people have seen in practice. No one bothering to run with it is one obvious potential outcome. Some players running with it and producing contradictory story is possible but I don't expect it to be a significant issue.
How has this gone in the past?
Absolutely, it's hard to maintain the separation of characters over a long period of time. An important question to ask yourself is how much energy you're willing to commit to sleuthing into the long tail of players with actually good OPSEC.
The +alts system on CoH and NPM generate random IDs when someone registers. The list of characters that they consider their alts is stored under that ID. When a player claims that another PLAYER bit is also theirs it sends the second a prompt to verify or deny that claim. When the claim is verified, if both PLAYER bits have ID numbers with alt lists, one of the two IDs is picked arbitrarily and the lists are merged under that ID, removing the old ID.
I haven't figured out a reliable way to detect fraud and I'm pretty confident it's not feasible to do casually. As you mentioned, throwaway emails aren't a barrier. IP addresses will be shared by multiple players in the same household, will change on many Internet connections, and can be sidestepped via mobile and cloud hosting providers.
Players will usually tell someone that they secretly have other alts so HUMINT is your friend there, but not reliable. A handy signal is that most clients will state what they are during telnet negotiation, upon first connection. This gets into analyzing packet capture, will be error-prone, and won't be worth your trouble except in extreme cases. Another tool accessible in packet-capture land baysian analysis which is probably less worth your trouble.
The good news is that most players will won't take steps to evade alt detection and will usually use the same SEMAIL across their characters.won't do evasive things with respect to IP. They also don't bother to register +alts although that may be because we've never required it.
Part of my automated backup process involves encrypting them with gnupg. Since they're encrypted and the key is managed sanely for CoH I just make them publicly visible on the website: http://www.cityofhopemush.com/backups/
In theory that means that if someone wants to ensure that their character is recoverable at a specific time they can grab a copy of the backup and I can recover it later. In practice it means the person running the game can operate independently of the person hosting the game (the backups are encrypted to each of us).
In @Chime's case this probably wouldn't help since the "customer" was expecting everything to be done for him.
You @readcache as a wiz to get the MUX to reindex the text files?
@Bobotron said:
Not specifically related, but someone elsewhere mentioned that City of Hope closed and then immediately 'forked' with the same staff. I couldn't find any kind of closing notes or anything though.
Not correct. CoH has never closed. It's been down for a few hours at a time here and there when my Internet connection or server have failed. I forked the database for New Prospect. Coyote and I have wiz bits on both but the bits on CoH go unused with the exception of me logging into CoH occasionally to help fix something. Sea Cucumber has a retired staff bit on CoH which is also unused. Between the two games there is no overlap in active staff.
@Cobaltasaurus said:
This might be more appropriate in the 'How-To' section, but.
My advice is to have an indoor and an outdoor parent, and then setup your @conformat with an if(strmatch(parent(<exit>), <parent you want>), <list parent>), and do this twice for your two different exit lists.
You can have an Indoor Room Parent and an Outdoor Room Parent. You can then test the parents of the home() and loc() to discover that the exit goes inside->outside, outside->inside, or neither. Then the parent of your exits doesn't matter and as a benefit you can tell if a room is outside or inside for the purposes of weather, time, vehicles, etc.
Posted over a year ago and definitely a can of worms: http://www.cityofhopemush.com/cohdb/
If you plan to make a public game, Rook's right: you'll probably spend as much time demolishing as you would digging and descing.