An alternative approach that doesn't require MySQL is to have an external bot that can log in, do the decompiles, and save the output somewhere. I have a bot written in Go for this saving to an sqlite3 database. It does require softcode support. I'm using it to currently archive Jobs and Characters+Sheets. I plan to adapt it to grab +bb and census data as well.
Full Disclosure: I'm an open RDBMS disliker and MySQL hater.
@ThatOneDude said:
Full consent always makes me think about the little shits that don't like ICA=ICC. So Player A comes up and plays keep away with the werewolf's hat ( Player B ) in a scene Player B is in with some other people. If the werewolf says, "Cool, since you are being an idiot I'll punch you in the mouth." Player A can say, "Nope..." and then continue to ruin any semblance of fun that could have been going on.
I recently saw this characterized as "Cowboys and Indians". "BANG BANG I SHOT YOU" vs "NUH UH". The game as whole will succeed or fail based on our ability to foster and support a culture that encourages and rewards cooperation and disincentivizes obstructionism. Maybe the game will become dominated by disruptive players and tank. We'll work against it, we hope we can stay on top.
The only recourse then is to what? Break up the scene, go to a private room where other "good" RPers can't join easily. Where does that lead us? Cliques?
The first recourse is to deal with them directly. When we speak to people politely and respectfully, it sometimes gets results without the need for some authority to come in and slap people around.
If it doesn't, the next step would be to leave the person behind. It's inconvenient, but if done consistently the offender won't find RP. If they continually try to insert themselves into RP where they're disruptive it becomes an issue of OOC conduct, not of RP consent. Then I get involved and discuss that player's role on the game and set up some guidelines.
Cliques don't form because one person chases everyone away. Cliques form because a group of people feel more comfortable RPing with each other than with the player base at large. Cliques are a part of human behavior.
@Coin said:
What I really don't get is why they're still going with dice when it's Consent. Either go full consent or don't, IMO.
Some people like an element of chance. Players decide for themselves how a scene plays out. If they want to negotiate things, that's cool. If they want to roll dice, also cool. I think the best is to negotiate in advance which possible outcomes are acceptable and then let the game rules determine which outcome is realized. I'm not going to tell people what to do though.
@Coin said:
I would probably limit it to "slots" and have certain stats occupy more slots than others. So maybe taking an Attribute from 3-4 occupies 3 slots (old rating, since this is oWoD Revised) for a time span calculated on 4 (the oWoD Revised multiplier for Attributes). If the "default time span" is "1 week", it would take 3 weeks.
Using this system means that people have to strategize what to raise, when to raise it, etc. It's actually pretty cool.
When we were originally building CoH, I had a system like this for learning times. The number of slots you had was based on one of your stats. You could use multiple slots to learn one thing faster but with diminishing returns. Ultimately we decided to not use learning times so it went out entirely. Still, it had the nice feature that you could be "preapproved" for a bunch of XP spends which I thought would make it more efficient from an administrative perspective. On New Prospect, we're not doing multiple slots for a single power for the sake of simplicity.
As an aside: your presentation regarding your views on RP Staff is pretty condescending. "RP Staff Are Bad"? Really? We get it, you don't like it, but you come off super bitter and resentful. Maybe consider revising the way you present your core reasoning to something positive, instead of "Boo on RP Staff! Shunnnn!"
This is a good point. We understand that specific people can be be good RP staffers. My personal belief is that things are stacked against the well-intentioned ethical RP staffers. When we walked away from City of Hope in 2013 I wrote a post mortem about the game and RP staff as a role in general. (http://www.cityofhopemush.com/cohdb/post-mortem.txt) A rough summary of what I said there is that plenty of staffers are unethical, the ethical ones are severely disadvantaged, and that unethical behavior is significantly more incentivized than ethical behavior. I'll make no claim that my premises or rationale were air-tight.
That's not well-conveyed in the page you cite though. I can see it coming off as a claim that RP staffers are inherently unethical. I can see ethical (and unethical) RP staffers feeling personally insulted and that's not something I want. It should instead present our issues with RP staff as a common occurrence and explain that we think avoiding those issues is so important that we've gotten rid of RP staff to prevent it. Something like that anyway. I'll get some editing on it over the next couple of days.
We've structured the timing for Dick Size such that if you're moderately active you'll go from 1-5 in about 9 months.
@icanbeyourmuse said:
I can't decide what I think of this Dick Size thing. It both amuses me and annoys me.
The name is more than a little tongue-in-cheek.
It's a sort of disadvantage to Vampires, Changelings, and Demons in that it artificially caps their powers. It's a boon to Shifters and Mages as we've done away with Renown and Seekings. You're not reliant on others to progress. This also means that people will progress without having "earned" it, but you can't run afoul of some clique who controls a sphere.
@Cobaltasaurus said:
Please explain Dick Size to me. Using small words.
We're giving everyone a cap stat the way shifters have Rank and Mages have Arete. You can't take powers over your cap stat. Your Dick Size increases automatically over time (with your other stats) and at any time you can increase your cap stat up to your Dick Size. When you're Rank 2 and your DS goes up to 3, you can immediately go up to Rank 3 or continue to play at Rank 2 as long as you see fit.
@silentsophia Sorry, couldn't find a trace of your Space Van 
Coyote and Sponge are back!
Some people loved City of Hope, some people hated it. We became dissatisfied with the direction it took after we stepped away from the helm so we've decided to fork the game we created and do things differently.
First we've switched to full consent. We don't actually think consent is the best way to go, but it's necessary for our main objective: abolishing RP staff. We feel really strongly that people having arbitrary authority over the RP of others is inseparable from the aspects we dislike in most games. Our goal is to automate away or abolish all functions performed by RP staff.
This means there won't be Theme Police. It being Consent, no one has to play with anyone they don't want to and we'll be providing tools to make that easier as we go along. Outside of RP, we're back to our original stances on Privacy and Harassment.
I haven't finished self-service CGen yet so we're still using the crappy old self-statting system with manual approvals. I'm making help management a function of the website with updates being imported into the game's helpfiles. That's not online so the in-game help is behind the website help.
We're trying some pretty strange things. It's going to be awesome and it's going to be crazy. It's not going to fit everyone's taste and that's just fine.
We have V:tM, W:tA, M:tA, W:tO, D:tF, and C:tD. All Revised where possible, 2nd ed otherwise. No KoE or Bygones. No 20th Anniversary.
@Cobaltasaurus said:
Most of that went over my head. I had very basic introductions to C++ and Visual Basic in middle school, and can cobble together something in CSS thanks to leaning from wikis, but other than that my experience is in softcode.
There are all kinds of ways modern languages try to keep you from shooting yourself in the foot and to help you structure your programs so that they don't grow into a hideous mess that no one can understand.
When you use these language features you either have to already understand what they do or you're stuck parroting code you've seen. However, when you change the code you've copied it can behave in strange ways. These features are essentially magic to a beginner and in python and similar languages you can't avoid using these features. Thus you end up having to write programs you don't have the prerequisite knowledge to understand. Not a problem with the language, it's just a bad for as an introductory language.
If you're not really comfortable programming outside of MU, I strongly recommend LOGO as a supplement to python. It will make learning python significantly easier.
@ThatOneDude said:
@Cobaltasaurus This site could help: http://www.codecademy.com/
Has python listed as one of the languages it teaches. Suppose to be free tooooooooooooooo.
It's a great language for getting things done. I think it's a terrible teaching language though, at least as an introductory language. You have to absorb fundamental programming structures and syntax and the API and software architecture (OO, functional, modules, etc), all at the same time. Same is true for just about all the common languages nowadays. Shame that Pascal seems to have died off.
@Glitch said:
@Sponge said:
I cannot overstate the value of learning a test framework (like pytest), a mocking framework (pymock), a logging framework (we use an in-house one), and the python debugger.
I think it depends on level of experience. I don't know what level @Cobaltasaurus is at, but I think most of that is too much for a beginner still learning primitives.
I agree and I should have stated that.
I write python 2.7 professionally on a daily basis.
I learned it from "Python for Unix and Linux System Administration" being already familiar with a handful of other programming languages outside of softcode. IIRC, the book is largely recipe-focused which makes it practical but perhaps with a slightly steeper learning curve. The book talks a lot about ipython which is a wonderful resource for exploration and experimentation.
I cannot overstate the value of learning a test framework (like pytest), a mocking framework (pymock), a logging framework (we use an in-house one), and the python debugger.
For anyone else who wants to get into programming but doesn't have much experience I strongly recommend putting like 40 hours into http://turtleacademy.com/. It teaches a toy language called LOGO that's useless except for making pretty pictures and teaching fundamental programming concepts with minimal confusion.
@Cobaltasaurus said:
How do I find a list of all rooms with a specific parent?
@Glitch said:
@find Outdoor ParentThen, if the Outdoor Parent's dbref is #25, for example:
@search parent=#25
On MUX at least:
think children(#25)
Depending on what you get out of the box on your server, you may run into trouble at the configure stage. In Debian and derivatives you'll need to run "sudo apt-get install build-essential" before that stage.