Posts made by Taika

Productive day is productive! We have a +map up. It does not have color or track location, /yet/, but it is up and pretty and makes me oh so proud, because I am frikkin awful at ansi artsy stuff.

Quick update:

Old grid is down, trying to figure out the map code to remove the old map and begin building the new one.

Finally got around to removing the old pc/npc bits - I dragged on this in case someone said 'I want my thing!' last minute.

Lots of discussion about changes to the setting (increasing the time since the Fall)

There's some alterations to the BL's happening, but seriously, they're pretty damned awesome.

Here's what I have dug:

South County
Kirkwood
West County
North County
Florissant
Alton
Granite City
(hidden) Mosenthein Island (Hello, Pirates!)
Normandy
St. Louis
East St. Louis
University City
Clayton
Richmond Heights
Brentwood
Maplewood
Webster
Afton
Jefferson County
Lemay

I also need help tearing out the old +map and putting in the new one. I have no idea what the commands for it are, and there was never a helpfile put in when it was installed way back when.

Man, finding interesting places to add to the empty grid to start building it is rough. Guess I'll have to get creative and start making no-Gauntlet zones and dropping the flavor stuff before I worry too much about finding real places. Who would have thought St. Louis would be kind of dry of interesting things?

As a headsup: F&L threw 2 SIGSEGV's today, and the second one crashed it on the automated restart.

Code-wise, I think the only thing still needing fixed is the XP system. Yay progress!

I gave notice before, and tonight after some errands, I'm going to start removing the old pcs and npcs.

Starting work on going through Hurt Locker, the equip code, working on descing the grid up and finding places of interest to add to each neighborhood.

@Ganymede is doing some pretty awesome work on the bloodlines.

Then to tackle the territory system and maybe adding a 'spend some xp to reroll during non-pvp situations' thing.

A couple of the things that came up was using a 1-10 instead of 1-5 scale. So each jump is smaller, and there's more jumps to take. The other was a cap. So it isn't 'every square can go to 10', it's 'this square has good water supply and caps at 7, but starts at 2 because it isn't the cleanest and needs a lot of work'.

Another thought was having food and water erode every week, so those need to be maintained, and make it so people need to pool together to really make progress. It'd also make owning multiple territories really hard.

Death's been sick and working all the hours, so it's been tricky to get everyone sat down to chat about it and solidify what's what.

I definitely want population to tie to blood. I want food and water to influence population. I want shelter and security to matter, too, though these will have a more subtle effect. For example: high food/water/population, but low shelter means people are eating well, but could be more prone to sickness or theft. Low security might make it easier for someone to sneak in and feed unnoticed.

Thenomain helped me get the in-game helpfiles working again :3 And I have the wiki up (only works using the ip, though). I know nothing about getting the wiki up and the logo in place. If someone could help me get that sorted, I would be really grateful.

Codewise, I'm looking for two systems. One for monitoring blood pools/usage (that can be easily reskinned for werewolf later), and one for tracking territory stats.

Real 'simple' (on the surface). I have attributes on the rooms for 'current level'/'max level'. Just need to it to pull up a little chart ish like this:

+------------------------------------------- Territory: (name of room) ---------------------------------------+
Owner: personplaceandthing Stat: 3/6 Stat: 2/6 Stat: 1/7 Stat: 4/7 Stat: 3/5
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

and would let staff do, say +turf/add +1/-1=territory name.

And call up via what turfs someone controls, or by turf name. so it could list more than one territory, and maybe a +turf/all to display all the territories.

maybe one to alter owner, too. to add or remove them.

I do have a system called +plots. It's basically a way to toss out plots staff wants run, or ideas players pitch. It's pretty neat. I found on a site that had a repository of code (not github). It's inelegant, but I added some things and made tweaks (like +plot/add posts to a bboard like +events does, so they can work in tandem.).

Sounds like the hard part might be getting people to play the 'what if' game to chat up ideas and inspirations for plots, or encourage people to request plots.

Though, getting handed a pre-written script to ST would suck. I won't do it I like keeping people on their toes a bit.

Thinking on it, I like when people pitch ideas.

'Hey wouldn't it be cool if...?'
'Couldn't we do something about that thing there?'

I enjoy ST'ing all sorts of stories, but sometimes, coming up with them can be rough on a tired brain. I also think sitting down and telling staff or st's 'hey, I'm interested in Y and Z types of plot, but X is kind of meh for me' is really helpful, too.

I also run into not knowing how characters respond unless I play with them often is a hinderance, too. I'll usually run a quick-n-dirty or two to feel out how someone thinks and reacts before trying to throw out more'complex' or less combatty-more-thinky plots.

tl'dr - tell staff and st's what turns you on, or toss ideas around with them.

We have code on Descent that lets Staff post up plots we want to see run, allows players to choose it, @mails out a synopsis in greater detail to the players, and opens a job. I think. I'll have to double check that last bit. It may just open a job with the synopsis. It also posts to a bboard when a new +plot is added to the list.

It's meant to pull in player ST's to help push bigger plots, or little threads of a bigger plot. Players can also pitch things they think would be cool to see happen, but don't necessarily want to st themselves.

This is separate from, but parallel to, +events.

ETA: I lied! I might have been working on tying it to +jobs, but it does not, yet, pitch a job. Damnit.

@Lisse24 This is neat! But takes tracking code. chinrubs a quick compromise seems to have +jobs open and having running tabs of what's what. Clunky, but it would work until we could get some code strung together.

@Lisse24 What are @clues and how do they work?

@Arkandel I love to leave questions for players to chew on, or clues to hunt down. Unfortunately, people don't seem too interested in a follow-up plot.

Players: 'A monster thing! Kill it!'
Me: 'clues to origins, hints at More To Come'
Players: 'It's dead now, whatever. No follow up.'

I always leave things a little open ended, but have never really had someone go digging into those loose ends.

Apologies. By 'big plot', I meant more 'metaplot' - a big story, over a longer spam of time, that needs smaller plots to get resolutions, that eventually build in a big reveal or a large group effort to bring down/fix, etc. This would be something like... finding out why the Thor Shot went off.

Little plot is a handful of scenes to build up towards (hopefully) a player driven goal. Like restoring power to a chunk of the grid. This could take some salvaging, bartering, running errands for trade in parts, etc, until the goal is accomplished.

Monster of the week is more the quick and dirty smaller scenes. Not exactly or always 'throw always', but usually one, maybe two scenes to accomplish a smaller thing.

Yes, I plan for people being able to exact changes to the world/grid. I also would hope that if Bob doesn't like Joe's faction, and Joe's faction is looking to leverage a big gain? That Bob would rally some folks to monkeywrench Joe's Big Plans.

Curious to get a feel for how much big plot (5+ scenes, or spanning months), little plot (3-5 scenes or a couple weeks), or monster of the week type things people are interested in or really want. I know too much is almost as bad (or worse in some ways) thn not enough.

What say ye, hivemind? How much plot is that sweet spot?

I like chicken waffles. BUT. I eat my waffles like waffles and dip my chicken strips in honey mustard. So I don't nom them together, at all, outside of them both existing on my plate at the same time.

Quick update, now that I'm unburied from the weekend and business type obligations:

@Ganymede has pitched and blurbed some -amazing- bloodlines, that are fantastic for the setting (she played the original and has a pretty good grasp of it). So steps towards conversion should be starting for those and/or discussions on if we want to swap any. But really, I love the ones that got pitched.

Bug Hunting will commence shortly. I know for certain that +xp is broked, and the in-game helpfiles need a server-side redirect to use the files.

@Cobaltasaurus - If you're interested, I saved the +job that had your to-do list on it. And if I remember right we had some troubles with getting the equipment code to accept new entries (or I was dumb and doing it wrong. Fair odds it was my fault XD).

Hurt Locker. Some of the things in there are pretty broken, so that'll be the next big project, I think, after tackling the bloodlines.

@Thenomain - I will probably need a bit of a refresher on adding/removing things from the cgen code, so we can add the bloodlines we get hashed out, and turn off/remove the templates we don't want to use, or want showing in 'stat (thing)'.

So much work!

Got the grid all dug, and starting on digging the places of interest in St. Louis.

ETA: CGen seems to be working fine, just need to desc edit the cgen rooms.

Sounds about right. Or Walking Dead, -zombies, +supernatural weird shit.

ST. Louis does have an massive underground landfill fire. AND nuclear waste storage.

Thor shot. Telephone pole sized chunks of titanium that were triggered out of orbit by (dundundun) something. Things got torn open, broken, ripped asunder. The Masq was kind of loosey-goosey in that most people knows there's shit out there, but it's still not real wise to get lynched for being one of the boogeymen.

Still plan on using the thor shot barrage. No one ever went digging into the big 'Why' of how it all happened, so there's still a big plot lying around in the corners of my mind.