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

@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?

@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.

@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.

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.

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.

@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.

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?

@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.

@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.

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.

@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.

@Miss-Demeanor said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Tehom I would posit that if people are struggling with current systems due to poor documentation, then clarification of current systems to ease use WOULD be more important than implementation of new systems that will suffer the same problems as the current systems. Ensuring that your players know how to easily navigate systems and files is probably one of the bigger things that should be prioritized (and often isn't).

I am reasonably certain that if I told every guy who was eagerly awaiting war systems for Dominion or everyone who wants PRP support or any criminal type who wants crime or every apothecary who wants recipes or every combat character who wants combat styles or everyone waiting for magic that all of these will be delayed by a year as I painstakingly look for the most unambiguous verb possible for each command and do my best to make everything as clear as possible through repeated submissions of help files for review that I would be murdered in my sleep.

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

Some of the documentation isn't terrible, but a lot of it is, and what's worse, the available indexes for commands are so random. If you go to the commands page on the game's official website (I hesitate to call it a wiki), they're not in any kind of determinable order - sure, they've got category headers, but putting those commands in say, alphabetical order would be nice. The category headers are not intuitive.

The help files list commands often do not explain the context of various switches, or how the command it's explaining applies in context to the game itself. I genuinely worry that it's a big turn-off for newbies.

I actually forgot I even made them viewable on the website. I made them alphabetical. Thanks!

The rest of the documentation is admittedly pretty terrible. It'd be great to rewrite a lot of them eventually. It's just difficult to find the time - I'm not willing to postpone major systems for it, and there's four offhand I can think of that need to be done first.

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

@Sunny

That would make sense. I'm not going to make a technical comment about it. I know of one simple workaround for that using Evennia, but I also know what it's like for someone to come in, look at your code, and say, "Why didn't you do this differently from the start?" Sometimes the answer is, "Because I didn't, and if you keep on going about it I'm going to take this code and shove it somewhere that you'd regret."

Make fun of neckbeards if you'd like, but they are some of the most chill people on the planet. Not all of us coders are Big Bang Theory tropes. (n.b., I am not a neckbeard. I'm a skinny neurotic beta nerd, thank you.)

I could easily see alternate implementations that don't use email at all, but create a throw-away player account that restricts their permissions (and that of the associated character they create) during character creation and while waiting for approval, then grants it to them post-approval. It might be cleaner overall, honestly, but I don't feel redoing the entire process at this point would be a good use of my time.

Evennia doesn't have any use of email built-in, but django does, which is what the user/player account model for Evennia is built upon, so extending it to send emails out is fairly trivial (it's something I should probably revisit at some point to use twisted's email package rather than django's for better error handling, but whatever). Additionally, most django packages you can add have some expectation of email being used (like a helpdesk package that I grabbed and turned into our +request/@job system), and while I wasn't using those features, I could imagine a time where we might wish to. For example, by default the helpdesk would have sent out emails to anyone with a response of some boilerplate for any ticket that was answered, and I had to rework that since I thought it would startle people.

That said, email was never really meant to be a hard requirement, because I could foresee people who would be uncomfortable giving it out, it just seemed to make the whole process a lot smoother. Given the ease of getting temporary email addresses that exist specifically for the purpose of people registering for things, or being able to get a new dedicated email address that's a throw-away/spam-absorbing thing, I didn't think it'd be a show-stopper for anyone, but as I said, I would be willing to manually go through the approval process for someone who was uncomfortable using those things.

@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.

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

@Tehom Fix chest locks.

/wrists

@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.