Best posts made by Tehom

@icanbeyourmuse said in Arx on github:

Would it be hard for an Evennia dumb person to install?

It might be a little tricky, since you have to get Evennia installed, and that assumes that you're creating a game from scratch. Instead of the stuff Evennia creates for you, you'd have to replace it all with that repo, and then do additional configuration steps of creating a settings.ini file outside source control. In general, I feel it'd probably be easier for someone to create their own game from scratch and then just grab whatever they like from the repo and use it, but YMMV.

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

Right now, there's not a lot of...coherence? Across mechanics, which means that you're learning a lot of completely unique and separate mechanical systems that nonetheless are using the same resources and stats, but not necessarily in the same or predictable ways.

I completely agree, actually. I'm profoundly unsatisfied with how disconnected the various systems are - they only have the most tenuous of connections with one another since each were just created to satisfy different requirements, and it's something I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about. The task system I'm very unhappy with currently (it only marginally fulfills some of the purposes it was created for, but is needlessly complicated and onerous, while completely failing to fulfill other roles envisioned for it), so I definitely want to change it significantly, but I don't think I have the luxury of doing that for some time, unfortunately.

Thanks for writing the excellent guide, Griatch! I went with python-decouple for secret settings configuration after reading some horror stories about how difficult debugging can be when using private/secret settings files outside source control that wind up having executable code in them via imports or the like. That should almost never happen with normal use and removing it makes setup a lot easier on people, so I agree with the removal.

@apos said in Arx on github:

I'd just go through the code and identify, 'this is stuff I'd replace' and consider commenting it out, so you don't get to a spot where you are trying to create complex data migrations due to things being stored in the database using existing stuff you think doesn't fit your game. Otherwise, why not? Learning how to change a lot of the stuff to work in a way you want might be one of the best ways to learn Python, as you get practical experience in fixing things.

To add to that, django is designed to sort of have a plugin architecture like that. the INSTALLED_APPS tuple in settings are meant to be distinct packages that you can remove if you don't want to have them - commenting them out means that they'll no longer be detected for migrations or anything else. Some of the apps do use one another as dependencies though, I didn't do a good job in making them self-sufficient.

For commands, removing them is really straightforward. They're added to "command sets" which are either in commands/default_cmdsets, or from the cmdsets directory, usually commands/cmdsets/standard.py. If you don't want a particular command added, you'd just comment out where it's added to the cmdset.

@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.

There's a number of tutorials in Evennia. I tend to also favor the "just dive in" approach, but you could also try a book like "Automate the Boring Stuff With Python" which tries to teach python by letting you write various scripts for different tasks. A lot of them are kind of contrived but I think it gets the point across.

As others echo though, general python knowledge might be a prerequisite for Evennia, but that's in itself just a starting point. Evennia is a framework built on other frameworks, so there's some deep tribal knowledge there that there's no way around than just looking through it.

The point about how social scenes should serve some purpose kinda resonates with me as far as coded systems go. Like any scene in a book or show might not necessarily impact the plot, but generally serves some purpose in trying to demonstrate some aspect of a character's personality, demonstrate how something impacted a character, how a character's relationship with someone else is changing/growing, or some other aspect of character development. It seems like it'd be possible to have a system that'd reflect that and make otherwise inconsequential scenes meaningful in an aggregate kind of way, showing how these things accumulate to change or emphasize a character's personality. I'm not really sure how to do it in a way that wouldn't feel burdensome or annoying, though.

@bananerz said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers:

I'd like the ability either have messenger/anon (name)=(pun here) or a specific spot in the city center where you can do it too.

Staff have this ability. The ability to send messages from a criminal alias was something I coded a while back as part of NV's crime branch, so it'd come in whenever that's finished, probably.

@golgoth said in Arx on github:

@tehom Raymond Hettinger said to me and nine other people at a Panda Express: "PEP 8 is a standard you enforce on yourself, not others."

'Python's super() considered super!' won't save you when the angry mobs come, Raymond.

I just want to echo Griatch and Faraday here - taking stuff apart and playing with it is probably the best way to learn. I'm more than happy to talk about how to adapt any particular feature from Arx, too.

@templari said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:

You can claim what you want to claim to be. But I also do not see you calling anyone out above for being 'off topic'. Like I said. I feel very unwelcome. I took this post to be referencing free speech.

Is free speech by others making you feel very unwelcome? If so, what would be your suggested solution?

@Atomic said in A fully OC supers MU:

I am presently learning python for work, but just getting started. Long term, Evennia will probably work for me, if I can find a python coder to carry me until I can make things and not break everything.

To stick with M&M as the system, I'll have to generate a die roller, charsheets, chargen, and point trackers. I'm guessing most of the standard utilities are repo'd out there somewhere.

If you decide to go with Evennia, they have a pretty lively IRC that's connected to a Discord channel, and people are usually pretty fast to answer questions. I'm also happy to help with questions about python/django if you're stuck on how to implement or fix something - I can be reached either by messaging here or on Discord (I'd show up in the mods list of the Evennia discord channel).

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

I think there are a lot of improvements that could be done here (certainly on the part of Evennia). But I also think that there is a limit to how much a game engine can help you ('you' in the general sense, not you in particular). We are not anywhere near said limit yet, mind you. But I don't think it's realistic for people to expect to be able to run a multiplayer MMO from scratch without having any technical skills or willingness to pick up such skills. "Just" being creative is all fine and dandy if you have someone else doing the coding, but if you are setting out to make a game on your own you must be expected to actually learn the craft, IMO.
.
Griatch

I think the willingness will usually be there if the barrier to entry is low enough. One thing that struck me recently is an informal poll of web developers that showed a pretty significant number of them got their start by modifying html in Neopets or similar games. The key there, to me, is "modifying" - adoption is far higher if they can easily find existing code and change it to produce a result rather than try to create something from scratch.

For example, in Evennia, you currently generate typeclasses that are stub child classes of Evennia's parent classes. You could do the same thing with commands, and have docstrings in the modules that either contain or link to tutorials on where to find the parent classes and how to modify/replace their code in the children in their game directories. Parent classes that are used by default when generating the gamedirs could also be based on prompted values during initial setup: based on their choices, you use one contrib or another. I'm a little ambivalent there: copy and pasting the code in its entirety would probably be easier on people than dealing with inheritance, but would also mean they'd get completely out of date from upstream changes in Evennia. Maybe explicit super() calls with comments that always explain what that means?

LCS fan here. I've watched League of Legends from the start, which means I'm a long-suffering fan of North American teams even while we're consistently dumpstered by every other region. God I hope TSM can get it together before playoffs. Missing worlds last year was terrible, and it feels like they're imploding again - even Bjergsen isn't playing great, and that's pretty worrying when he's been the only consistent performer on the team for years.

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

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

But most people honestly don't.

Bull.. Shit.

Most people see this kind of behavior all the time. They've just never worked in the environments you mentioned before, which teach you to actively recognize and respond to it. They're happy to go on ignoring it like they never noticed, but I don't believe for a second that they've never seen it, or that those maladaptive behaviors are not the norm.

Pick up pretty much any kind of psychology book and you'll see why this statement doesn't hold an ounce of water.

I'm reasonably sure that "any kind of psychology book" won't disprove the notion that people encounter different things based on their environments. Most people are intellectually aware that people do bad things, yes. We're all aware that snuff videos of ISIS decapitations exist, child pornography, and the like. Yet we don't have to see it on a daily basis because we're not Facebook content moderators: it is not the norm for us.

Similarly, I'm aware that many people in this hobby behave badly, and people display the same bad behavior in real life. Yet I do not see such behavior in my professional environment, because in that environment there would be severe consequences for behaving similarly.

@cobaltasaurus said in Arx on github:

It’s really tempting to grab this and run (as it is I have some stuff I do want to take I just haven’t had a chance to install more than basic code), but I’ve been a little bit worried about seeming to be an “Arx clone” if we went with the same diceroller / system stuff even with changes we’d need to make for our particular thematics.

Personally I don't think you should be that worried about it. You'd probably wind up changing enough that it'd be really hard to tell if you were using code from elsewhere, and the important intellectual property that makes a game distinct will always be in the database, not the code.

@Meg said in Meg's Playlist:

it was short, i'm back. doing much better. udated; hmu if you wanna chat.

Welcome back!

My best was barely scraping into plat 5 for two seasons, but I haven't played much in years. I'd be really lucky to be able to hit silver now, I think.

It's a fair point that nobody wants to read walls of text - my inclination towards requiring theories was mostly to avoid the mass clue dump situations, which have been a problem ever since clue sharing has been in. I'm not really that concerned about how liberally clues are shared, but more about information overload being a very negative experience for those on the receiving end of clue dumps.

But if writing theories is too annoying for people, or the theories themselves are too verbose to feel good when receiving them, I should probably try to find some more lightweight rate-limiting deal.

I really apologize for coming across as just telling you to try harder - that wasn't what I intended at all. What I meant is that if the code is too intimidating, I'm happy to help you take out whatever features you like and change/adapt it for your game. That sort of taking things out and repurposing them is how I learned, though it's fair to say that the approach doesn't work for everyone. I'm happy to go over code that's confusing (and most of my code isn't clearly written and definitely poorly documented, unlike Evennia) and explain things, or suggest ways to implement features you like.

If using Arx wholesale and changing things is easier for you, I'd be happy to help with that too. I've talked to other people on Discord a lot with some of the setup problems and stuff, I really don't mind.