Best posts made by Tehom

So I decided to finally scrub out all the API keys or other wacky/sensitive stuff from version control and make an orphan branch of Arx on github in case people wanted to tinker with Evennia or use any code ideas for their own projects. I'll probably update the branch there with major updates, like any new system we add.

I'm okay with pull requests/opening issues there if people are so inclined, though I don't really wanna spend the time going through the hundreds of open feature requests in our helpdesk system and moving those to issues right now.

Anyhoo, here it is: https://github.com/Arx-Game/arxcode

The next time anyone bitches about lack of documentation for Arx I'll threaten to hire Chet to write it all.

My work story can be summarized with the quote: "Gaze not into the abyss, lest you become recognized as an abyss domain expert, and they expect you keep gazing into the damn thing."

So the team I joined was just a teensy bit lacking when it came to rigor. The entirety of their testing consisted of one QA person who had a regression test suite that would hit endpoints on our staging environment. That was it. The whole thing. So I tentatively kept asking about 'Have you heard the good news about our lord and savior: Unit Tests' and they kept kinda brushing me off, saying that they didn't have any idea how to get django's test runner with Oracle, and even if they did who has the time to write unit tests, amirite?

Undeterred, I decided to both get the test runner working with Oracle, and then write extensive unit tests for the core models of our app when I was doing a major refactor. Yay, we have tests, everyone's happy! I mean, I don't particularly enjoy writing tests, and am far from an expert in the subject, but sure, great.

Then it devolves into some guy who's a pal of the team having a Jenkins instance that he was randomly running some security scans on our software images, and they ask if I can get the tests hooked up to there. Okay, sure, I've never used Jenkins before but I guess I can spend time doing that.

Fast forward to now and I'm somehow responsible for managing every aspect of our Jenkins instance and constantly trying to open cases with our IT department that actually owns the global configuration and can change fucking plugins that never seem to work right. I absolutely hate devops with every fiber of my being and somehow I've become our designated devops guy. Also, I'm still the only member of the team who even knows how to read tests much less write them, so I'm stuck with constantly letting people know when they'd break the goddamned build.

@carex said in Development Thread: Sacred Seed:

It really doesn't matter how smart, wise, or powerful a woman is because she can make more people. If she is powerful, people will demand she make more powerful people. It's just a matter of survival. If you have a good thing, make more of it.

Things might have been a tad different in those societies if the people in question had the ability to turn someone into ashes with their mind. Fantasy worlds provide the opportunity for speculative historical fiction rather than just going 'medieval Europe, but with eye-lasers'.

One thing I didn't expect from our own game is that if you decide to break from a strict historical analogue to have a more progressive society how much pushback you get over it. Like saying 'oh, it's an egalitarian society, sexism isn't really thematic' seems simple, but HOO BOY, people will try to undermine that constantly. It requires you to be extremely explicit in help files and culturally have the playerbase on board with correcting misconceptions constantly. Some players are really, really married to the concept of calling other players whores in their pretendy freetimes.

I am willing to die on the hill of toopul.

So in the 'Earning Stuff' thread, there was a digression about the difficulties that can be created when player expectations and the reality of managing a game don't properly align. Players tend to want agency and for their actions to matter, but can have wildly different expectations for scope - on the most toxic end, you have players who are incredibly unhappy when any other player gets some recognition or anything that makes them special in some way, whereas probably the most benign examples would be players who want their efforts to help support the stories of other players to be registered at all.

What I'm curious about is the approaches that people might take to try to address the problem, if they think it's one that can have a solution at all. Should it be done culturally, with help files, onboarding of new players or the first time they participate in some staff-run plot, or something else that informs them to manage their expectations? Should it be something coded, where the scope of impact they could hope to achieve from some given action would be clearly delineated? Should it only be addressed on a behavioral level by talking to players who are clearly outliers? Or something else entirely?

@sparks said in Arx on github:

@tehom said in Arx on github:

@wyrdathru said in Arx on github:

Now, what about tabs or spaces, camelCasing or PascalCasing, Li-nux or Lin-ux and more!

LET THE BLOODSPORTS BEGIN

Guido might have retired, but that hasn't stopped the violent gangs of devotees who lynch developers for flagrant violations of PEP8. Not a day goes by that you can't find a new victim's mangled body with a sign on them saying 'USED CAMELCASE FOR VARIABLES' or the like. I might disapprove of their methods, but I agree with them in principle.

Even PyCharm itself will yell at you for PEP8 violations!

I am confident that this is the only reason I am still alive.

@lemon-fox said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

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

I'm not above anyone humming loudly and pretending the code doesn't exist either if that's not their jam, but hopefully I can keep trying to get it more intuitive and friendly as time goes on.

I don't know if this is true for anyone else, but the biggest issue I had was trying to get retainers to work as helpers on investigations. The code there was...awkward, I guess? Everything else worked pretty well once I actually understood how it was supposed to work--support tasks took a long time for me to grasp, for example.

Yeah, not my best work. Too much abstraction is a hell of a drug.

@three-eyed-crow said in Arx: @clues:

Given that part of the theme is rediscovering lost knowledge, I don't know how thematic clue deterioration would be. I feel like, once it's uncovered, it's back in the wider world. I do wish you got a certain number of 'free' clue shares a week (kind of like your Teaching stat gives you free trains a week) but if I were to isolate the systems on Arx I think are semi-broken, clues would be fairly low on the list.

My hate-on for orgs that just bank a bunch of clues for people to brief themselves on with no context is vast and I think it leads to problems in terms of people RPing some real whack-a-doo things, but making clues harder to share individually and without scenes would just make this worse.

Requiring clue briefing from orgs (and possibly from individuals) to require bundling clues into theories in order to provide context is on the to-do list. It's a little more annoying to implement than it sounds, so it'll probably take a little while, though.

@Sparks said in Accounting for gender imbalances:

Putting on my "hi I have hiring responsibilities" hat, I can say that while a sizable gap in work history would earn a raised eyebrow from me, that's easily made up for—at least to me—if you have side projects out there you can point to. Especially side-projects that are open source and on Github. I love those! Please include things on Github in your resume! Then I can see your coding style! I can see if your commits are nicely separated into bite-size updates or if you have giant commits touching the entire code tree at once encompassing like two weeks of work! (Why do people do this?? That's not how source control is supposed to work! It wasn't how it was supposed to work even before git's distributed model!)

I feel so called out right now for --squashing my commits.

@bananerz said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered):

@ThatGuyThere Thanks! Got it, they made it clear just a few posts ahead of you but thanks for taking the moment to comment too, I appreciate it.

Irritated that folks aren't treating fellow players how they'd like to be treated. Imagine sitting at a table and every single time we sit, jerkface does something just to treat the other person across from them like garbage. I'd probably slap their face. Not really, I'd probably just leave the entire game and not come back because I'm very flakey.

I think some social cues that'd exist in a tabletop game aren't present here. Like a dogpile isn't all that obvious unless you're on the receiving end of it. Even if people are vaguely aware that other people are complaining at a person, they don't register it that much.

If we put back in condemns in some form, it'd probably have very tight throttling to prevent the sort of egregious dogpiling that just seems to happen in any text/faceless medium.

My feeling on them is that they should only be done when they're to emphasize or reinforce theme, or convey information that's relatively important. I think it's kind of damaging if people receive messages that are wrong in some way - if it's about something that isn't reflected in the room or character's current state, it's kind of jarring and annoying.

But for something that's meaningful, or fairly personalized for a character, I think it can be a nice touch.

@too-old-for-this said in MU Things I Love:

@sparks Shardhavens are too fun!

Pax's system is basically my favorite thing ever. I know just seeing the different things staff have come up with has completely delighted me, and I can't wait to see more people bump into them.

My feeling is if your game concept can be done in Ares, then it really should be - the amount of work that needs to be done to get an Evennia game up and running is pretty daunting right now, even with code samples from Arx or elsewhere. Hopefully that's not always the case, but as is I'd endorse Ares for anything that fits it reasonably well.

If your game can't and you do want to try Evennia, I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have, though.

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

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

They have an easy application

They want an email for application. That's an instant "nope!" here. On two grounds:

1. I don't know them from a hole in the ground. I'm not going to hand them my email.
2. If(f) they think this somehow "secures" things they're too stupid to staff.

I don't know (or care) if #2 is true or not. #1 is sufficient grounds for turning and walking away.

I am honestly confused how anyone could ever imagine that an email would be anything more than a convenience for automating the application process so that a GM doesn't have to be on hand. I'd be happy to waive it if someone is unwilling to provide an email, though I'd wonder why they wouldn't just google 'temp email' and save both of us time.

@cobaltasaurus said in I made a Python-with-Evennia tutorial (looking for feedback):

I, um, have a dumb question but so far I can't find it in the documents. How do I get information about an object-- for example location?

The @ex command is a staff command for returning a display with information on an object. You can also examine individual values in its attributehandler with @ex <object>/<attribute>.

For a lot of things I tend to rely on using @py, which is a powerful command used for executing arbitrary python code. Like I'll frequently do something like: @py x=self.search("whatever");x.do_some_other_call();self.msg(str(x.do_something(some_parameter))) to see the return value of calling a method on some object.

@Meg You'll be missed. I'm wishing you the best and hope things get better for you.

I think it depends. If absolutely no one seems to be intrigued by something you thought was cool, then it might just be something that needs to be retooled. But evaluating that can be difficult - people might be more interested than they appear, especially if there's a few louder voices who kind of drown them out. A difficult thing, though, is to try to keep people who don't really care about a particular plot from ruining the fun of people who do want to buy-in to that without being draconian about it

On Arx, we tend to be pretty strict about enforcing theme because it's important both to staff and a lot of players. A player might not really buy into one of the themes, and that's totally okay, but what's not okay is them pretending it doesn't exist and wrecking things for people who enjoy it. Unfortunately, policing that sort of thing is very time-consuming and difficult: unless you have players willing to call stuff out themselves it's probably a losing battle.

@Griatch said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

I'm not sure a single killer-game is something realistic to achieve, at least not one decided on-by-committe. But I do think that breaking out of the legacy command syntaxes, making sure to always have proper tutorials and offering more quality-of-life features specifically aimed at newbs would go a long way, regardless of genre. Maybe one could make a framework for this that people could easily plug in and fill with their game-specific info. It's something I could probably add to (in my case) Evennia with relative ease, coming to think of it.
.
Griatch

I have a few things on my wishlist for the far off future.

I would love to have something sort of similar to django-cookiecutter but for game templates out of the box, but even more accessible than that: some sort of wizard where someone who has absolutely no programming experience could enter a bunch of values to customize a game experience out of the box. Ideally we'd configure their settings file for them, then apply some fixture or database seed values for a game genre, and then the rest is up to them. For example, selecting 'medieval fantasy game' might add a 'contribs.fantasy_template' to INSTALLED_APPS which would more or less be what Ainneve is supposed to be, automatically adding relevant commands, etc.

I think the biggest hurdles coming into this hobby are getting started as a game-runner and getting past the text-based interface for a player. Ares is making great strides with both areas. I think it's unfortunately very rare for most people who want to make a game to have both boundless motivation to do both heavy lifting of creative writing work and want to tinker with deployment/configuration/coding on the technical side. Anything that makes either area easier probably would increase adoption proportionally to how painless they are, imo.