@Derp said in Faraday Appreciation Thread:
@saosmash said in Faraday Appreciation Thread:
Faraday is a class act and a half, and she won't even take money for the work she does for this hobby even when people are trying to throw it at her.
I would, no lie, contribute to some kind of tip jar for her work.
In a hot second. For real.
Faraday once spent three days helping me debug a problem that ended up being a stupid server issue that had nothing at all to do with code. And when I say three days, I mean HOURS and HOURS over the course of three days. I definitely remember feeling like it consumed entire days.
She didn't know me at all beyond some passing forum conversations at the time. She's just that invested in helping people run stuff.
I can't even count the number of hours she's put in to helping me learn the ins and outs of everything Ares, starting from the existence of helpers all the way up to digging into javascript on the portal. I've never asked her a question and not gotten help - and I've asked her a LOT of questions.
I've watched the web portal on Ares go from 'hey this is kind of cool' to 'this is insanely revolutionary', mostly because she keeps listening to what people wish they could do, and making it happen. At a ridiculous pace, mind.
Faraday is a gift I'm not sure this community deserves, but I'm sure glad we've got her.
@Seamus
I'm sorry @Auspice but I really don't think they told them wrong. Faraday is real quick to say "no" to anything she doesn't agree with. And as you said, it's her right. But warning someone... That's a good thing too. I've contributed a "Dark Skin" for Ares.
This is bullshit.
I don't usually engage in this sort of stuff, but this is BULLSHIT.
Faraday is hands down the most patient, level headed person I think I've ever seen. I have seen her say no, firmly. I've also seen her spend a GREAT DEAL OF TIME explaining why she's saying no, what her philosophy is, and why it doesn't fit within that philosophy. Patiently. Clearly. Politely.
Including to you.
She's also spent a ton (and I mean a TON) of time helping me implement things that are never going to touch Ares core - some of which she doesn't particularly love philosophically. At least one of these things is now up as an Ares Extra for others who want to implement it.
Faraday is not only open to people modifying the server, but she actively supports it. I would not be half the ruby coder I am (whatever that is) without her continued patience and help.
I've also witnessed people being incredibly rude in the face of her helpfulness and generosity. Repeatedly. And it's bullshit, too.
@faraday said in Learning Ruby for Ares:
If you wanted to eliminate the human factor there and track someone's gear, you'd need an inventory system. Most likely the basis of it would just be a simple list of gear items, which is simple enough. But then you'd also need to figure out how people get gear, what gear is available, what the gear does, how it relates to other systems (like combat) ... all of which is highly game-specific. It can be done, but I'm doubtful that it can be done generically.
Spirit Lake has an inventory system for magical items and potions (that folks are welcome to look at if interested), but it definitely gets messy real fast if you want the inventory to limit what people can DO with things (ie, in combat). Ours do, but only via a lot of extra code.
Our code could probably be adapted fairly easily for generic items if you literally want to store lists and descs, but that's about it.
Or, @Derp , if you're wanting to build something out more fully, I can show you how I did it and it might offer some inspiration (caveat: there are often better ways to do things than the way I do things, but it does at least work).
Not forever. We're starting to hit our disk space limit - I think we're sitting at about 85%. But definitely for a good long while, and upping it isn't that big a deal.
But we've also been going for almost a year and have accumulated a LOT of stuff - and I keep a small test server on the same droplet.
@bored said in Serious Question About Making A MU:
But really none of that's the problem. Mostly I get hung up on the format itself. Everyone targets and exchanges volleys. Repeat. That's basically it.
I think a lot of combat RP ends up like this, but also it doesn't HAVE to. A great deal comes down to GMing. You can use a map and insist that people think tactically and refuse to allow people to attack without taking a turn to close distance, etc. You can set up enemies where teamwork tactics like distraction or suppression have a significant effect. It's extra work to do it, though, and I think some people don't find it worth the effort.
That is to say, I don't think the 'sameness' of FS3 combat is a result of the code, but of the GMing,
One thing I've started to do that I find more interesting is to only pose every 2-3 combat rounds, so you can wrap things up cinematically a little better rather than posing every strike. I think a lot of people have always done this, but I never had, and it's definitely made things more interesting because I can complicate the combat without slowing the scene down as much.
Guys. The new Beip client LOADS IMAGES. You can turn this on and off, and control where the image window goes.
Here's my current set-up, with the image on the right where I have blank space anyway due to line wrapping, with my second input box underneath it.
You might find something of interest on the Ares directory of games. Several are still in development, but a fair few are publicly open now.
@Admiral Are you sure? I know of someone who's running an Ares game entirely on the web portal for folks she used to RP on Discord with. Never touched a M*. They've said pretty explicitly that their players are young.
I know someone else who set up a sandbox game for her MMO friends, who she used to RP in GDocs with. It's more free form and less formal, but it's an introduction to our way of RPing.
Change takes time. Games running on Ares have only been around for 9 months - and the web portal has changed substantially in that time.
I don't think it's the only solution, or that tech is the only problem, but it is A problem - and it is HELPING.
@silverfox said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:
Regardless: Totally not trying to shovel shit. I'd gotten the misunderstanding that the main strength of the web portal was to allow for those longer scenes as people were able to pose. I didn't realize it was generally used almost as a replacement client. My bad.
It's kind of hard to really get how transformational something like the scene system and the Ares web portal really is to the M*ing experience until you play with it. I feel like I was a solid 6 months in before I stopped regularly exclaiming over something - and I still do it on occasion.
A system like this has several main benefits, but by far the biggest one is the freedom from the need for a constant, active telnet connection, and the correlation of that connection to a single character bit.
Last night I was in a scene that went late, and when we decided to pause, I just closed my client and went to bed. This morning, the whole scene is still there, waiting for me. I can recall it in my client, or read it on the web portal.
I have small kids, and I often write up set poses for things I'm GMing that night during the day. On a persistent web platform, I can write it, start the scene, and leave it sit there until start time, when the other players can join the scene and see what I've already written while I finish up bedtime.
I go home for lunch. I don't have to pause scenes anymore. Instead, I can leave a scene I was RPing slowly in at work and toss in a pose while I'm home at lunch, from the web portal. Or shoot off an IC text on my walk to a meeting. We have players who RP on their long commute home, on their phones - another way the portal helps timezones be less of an issue.
If I'm going to be 30 minutes late to a scene, I don't have to be sure to log on and drop my character into the room or find someone to paste me what I'd missed. I just pull it up on the portal and read it. (Incidentally, this also cuts down on the need to 'scene set' every time someone new joins a scene, which is freeing).
I can GM for people in timezones vastly different from me over the course of a day or even two. It's not my ideal type of scene, but it lets me involve players who previously would have just had to suck it up and not be in GMed stuff on games that I run.
I can RP in other scenes while I do this. I can RP in several scenes at once, if my time, attention, and internal timeline allow. I can finish up that scene from last night, and also have a text scene throughout the course of my work day about something that's pressing to another character. I personally don't like to double up on 'real' scenes very often, but the CAPABILITY is so freeing when I want or need to.
These are the sorts of limitations I didn't even realize existed with telnet only until I was freed of them. And they're just the ones revolving around RP. There are dozens more. The ability to set up my character in a graphical interface. To search logs. To see the same thing on the game and the web according to my mood. To not spam my screen with 'combat' a billion times - or to spam it and not care, because the log will be clean anyway, and I can always pull up the scene on the portal to see it without the HUD displayed. To casually page someone with something and know that they'll see it as soon as they log back on (or check the web portal - it's basically the same thing these days). To organize and filter jobs and respond to them in a graphical interface.
All of these things that we've gotten used to are things that are barriers to entry, for new people (whether young or not). They increase how much you have to WANT to do this hobby. Most of them, we don't even notice anymore, I think. Until suddenly they're gone.
Noticing these things, and figuring out how to remove them, is important. And hard.
I love watching players make hard choices or dig into some deeper aspect of their character.
I love high-emotion moments.
I love love LOVE watching the fallout from something. Even if the ST'd scene itself was kind of meh (we killed 10 giant bugs!), watching the characters COPE with the injuries or surprises or aftermath of action is the best reward for me.
I'm someone who also really can't handle bending my continuity very far (I regularly get frustrated if I don't know where text scenes fit in the scheme of the other scenes I've had in a day). BUT.
I also think that this is a really cool thing and one of the real strengths of Ares. I'd probably never run one that went more than a couple of days, where you could REASONABLY be paused if you wanted to, but we've used it to good effect to run scenes for players in differing timezones over the span of a day or two. Stuff that might take two hours in real time, but spread out.
Also, because the portal isn't reliant on a telenet connection, you can throw up a quick pose around chores or work or kids, or even on the bus on your commute via your phone.
I used to be someone who truly hated slow scenes - and they still aren't my favorite - but as I've gotten older and busier, I have REALLY come to appreciate the flexibility this gives me as both a GM and a player.
Oh yeah, so my in-game texts look like this now in Beip:
Everyone not me gets a default style, and then characters I text a lot get their own special background colors.
@Ninjakitten said in How to BeipMU: The best MU Client for Windows:
So, I'm playing with it a little, and as a SimpleMUer..
How can I send something to history without sending it to the game? I'm constantly hitting escape to pop something there, sending something else, and hitting ctrl-p to get back to what I was doing. Changing the keys for prev/next in history is easy enough, but is there any way to just store something?
Is there any way to turn off automatically copying when I highlight? I often highlight while I read because it helps me to focus on just what I'm trying to read right now. It's really annoying to have it copy and un-highlight on me.
Ctrl-down arrow, though I think you can set that to whatever you want in the keyboard shortcuts. I did a lot of ctrl-b'ing in SimpleMU so I should. Change that.
I don't think so. It's funny though because I started the same way but have now found myself getting annoyed that highlighting something in my browser doesn't also copy it. Might be worth a mention on the discord, he's pretty open to suggestion.
Another option for 'spawns' if you don't want to get too complicated and really like SimpleMU's separate window/tab:
You can set up a 'puppet' window for a character connection. Anything starting with a certain prefix will go there. You can set up this window to auto-add a prefix. So you could send it anything starting with <Public> and then have it start everything you type with 'pub'.
I spawn my channels this way by having anything that starts with [ go over, and input the prefix myself. I personally like this separate window behavior better.
@Packrat said in Wheel of Time:
One issue is that FS has each 'attack' keyed against a specific defense roll/skill but there should probably be multiple ways to defend against a lot of stuff.
If somebody chucks a fireball at you then you can try to cut the weave to mitigate it entirely, or block it with a shield of air, or if you are not a channeler you might be able to dodge it? Though mostly you get burninated.
Yeah, good point. And it's based primarily on the weapon, not the person. You'd have to think about how to deal with this.
@Tat
Slicing Weaves: Countering incoming channeling attacks with flows of Spirit (that's easy enough), with a distracting "lash-back" effect if one of your weaves is sliced.
FS3 already has a defense built in - every attack rolls against the defender's defense skill. I'd probably just have a specific skill called 'Slice' and make defenses against weaves roll that. The lash-back effect would take a little bit of code, but I think you could just have a failed attack apply a -1 attack or defense (or both) mod for the next round with some ease.
Multi-flow weaves: Creating lighting requires strength in both Air and Fire (as I recall, and maybe Spirit too?). It gets even more complicated when you get to the idea that the requirements for the same weave may be different for male and female channelers.
This one is harder, but not impossible. Spirit Lake's magic is set up so that you learn a spell, and you have to have the spell's School in order to learn it. It could certainly be made to require that you have air && fire. That we haven't chosen to do so is more a matter of OOC system complexity than anything, honestly. That might be a thing to consider - is it worth it to be super faithful to the texts, if it results in a headache of a system, or can you simplify?
Of note, if you were doing it the SL way, you'd create weaves that do specific things (for us, spells), because you have to config/code them all. If you wanted things beyond those weaves, you'd need some rules for rolling and what those rolls mean.
Shielding duels: Just straight up channeling strength contests, straining to cut the other person off from the One Power (magic). If the other person isn't holding the One Power, it's easy, but if the other person -is- holding the One Power, it's relatively impossible unless you a) distract them, or b) are much, much stronger than them.
So again, FS3's attacks are contested rolls. A skill called 'Shielding' or 'Duel' or whatever is appropriate could just do this as-is. Actually, not even in combat - just do a vs roll. If they don't have the One Power, their stats would be super low. Or mod your rolls. Etc.
ETA: Or magic One Power - we made magic an attribute that governs our schools, you could do that as well and then just roll your raw power for these duels.
Severing (hey look, I've thought of more!): It's Shielding with an edge (literally). If you succeed, you cut the other person off from the One Power forever (for certain definitions of "forever").
Same as above, but with GM intervention to adjust skills as needed on the result of the rolls. Though @faraday generally holds that FS3 isn't built for PvP, so that's a thing to keep in mind.
Overchanneling: Channel too much and you'll get really, really tired. Channel even more, and you might burn yourself out and make yourself unable to use the One Power ever again (for certain definitions of "ever again").
We have a mechanic like this in SL, but it's more RP flavor than something accounted for. That said, it would be pretty easy to add in a counter that ticks up every time you cast/weave something, and ticks back down on a cron, and if you hit a certain level it tells you 'you don't feel so good' and/or creates a job/sends a mail. The primary difficulty here is when IC time doesn't like up with RL time (like you've paused a scene, or fast forward a scene), so you'd want a way to set things manually, too.
What it can't do very well without relatively significant additions (from what little I've seen of Spirit Lake, but generally what I've seen from FS3) is slicing weaves, multi-flow weaves, or long-running slice/shield duels (most FS3 affects take place the turn you do them, save for reloading, from what I've seen).
It's been a long time since I've read these books - if you describe how these would need to function, I can probably speak to whether I think you can convince FS3 to do it (and how hard it might be).
@Packrat said in Wheel of Time:
Locking people in weaves of air was also a huge deal in the books and I am not sure how well that would translate to FS3. The ability of literally any competent channeler to immediately and inescapably incapacitate any one (or several if an actively powerful channeler) non channeling person in a heartbeat came up rather a lot.
You could hack this into FS3 pretty easily using subdue. In fact, SL is like 75% of the way there already - I call them 'stuns', but it's basically the same thing. Right now it's a roll, but there's no reason you couldn't make the roll auto-succeed (or just mod it up so the chances are really, really good). As is, you have to hold a stun spell (ie, keep casting it every round) to keep it working, but that's actually on my list to change.
I think even multiple targets would be fairly easy to introduce here.
@Rucket For what it's worth, Spirit Lake's code is all viewable on git and I have no issue with anyone snatching what they want (with credit), if it works for you. Though fair warning, the magic code I've done has its sticky fingers all over FS3 plugins and some other core plugins and at this point I couldn't even tell you what they all are.
That said, one of the reason Spirit Lake's magic works on FS3 as well as (I think) it does is because we wrote the world and the magic to fit how FS3 does and does not work. There ARE some things that just aren't easily accomplished, so that's a thing to keep in mind.
Anyway, I'm happy to answer questions if you get to a point where you have any.