Best posts made by Thenomain

So is this a discussion on themes and settings that should not be attempted in games, or themes and settings that the posters personally have no interest in? Because let me tell you, I never understood the attraction of Firan.

@Thisnameistaken

Call it a love letter to Gabe Newell. It starts: You broke my heart leaving Half Life 2 on a cliff-hanger, again, releasing four, five, six games instead of another Half Life, but I cannot quit you. I forgive you for everything for making a platform that people want to use, instead of one that the companies want people to use. You used the marketing of the superior to make us love you, and we do. Thank you. XXXOOO.

@Alzie said:

@Jeshin Then perhaps you need to actually define automated systems beyond 'Whatever I want it to mean at any given point in time.'

Alize blunts what I was saying. OR is a personal curated list and little else. It has an application process that I believe to be ridiculous and not at all representative of quality RP.

IMO, OR fails at its openly stated goal of quality RP because of its criteria.

Because of the same criteria and the way it's been defended, I don't see a welcome mat to coming over there and saying these things. I would be tilting at windmills. At least here I have the chance of an audience willing to discuss the merits of Some Other Site.

@tempest

Okay.

The civil rights movement was in full swing during 1963-64 and dear god 1965. The Beatles' first album, JFK's assassination, the nation was changing in ways that both allow what's going on today and informs the argument against it. You might even call the mid-60s a more violent reflection of the late 2000s.

I wouldn't want to play it either, but because I don't like the flights-and-tights genre for it's-basically-a-soap-opera reasons. Reminding people that their characters are probably deviants is the kind of theme-enforcement that is critical for a good game. It could also be done so ham-handedly that it's a drawback, but not doing so at all is, I believe, a disservice to the act of running a game.

I started my online RPG life on a dial-up BBS. I don’t mind multi tasking to fill in the time, but I could either RP on web forums or IRC, and I picked IRC every time. I prefer the back and forth of collaborative writing when I’m getting feedback within minutes, not hours, not days.

I think there is a place for play by post. I think it exists well, and has a lot of tools and ideas, but I see Mushes as online LARPs, and as such I’d like to see the tools more geared for improv than writing circles.

This is a wholely personal comment, but it seemed notable here.

@RDC said in NOLA: The Game That Care Forgot:

@Cobaltasaurus said in NOLA: The Game That Care Forgot:

I heard changeling.

We're waiting to hear back on a query Melpomene sent to @Thenomain - Taika said Changeling CG was done, Thenomain's notes on github say "nearly done".

I am a bit tipsy from cider right now, which makes me more poetic, so let me say:

Yeah, it's done, but it's breaking core CoD code.

Two games have dibs. Working on it.

Not sure how answering “don’t box me in; this is a discussion” turned into “straw man”.

Well, I do, but it’s no less silly for knowing it.

@faraday said in Questions About Evennia:

@thenomain said in Questions About Evennia:

+finger, +who, +where, in that order. These are the base three Learning To Mush Code systems that everyone should do. As +where is a nightmare in Mu*, I think that it would be a good example of why not to learn Mushcode.

Yeah. What I meant was - what would you consider to be a good example of one of those in MUSHCode to use in contrasting the two? My +where or +finger are customizable and briared in with my global functions and install system, so they wouldn't really make a good example. And you didn't like the current Evennia example so... is there a good contrasting example?

Well it depends on the goal of the example. If the goal of the example is to provide a well-formed and readable bit of MU* code vs. the same code well-formed and readable in Evennia, then I'm going to nominate a moderately complex but not overwhelming +finger code. The one Cobalt writes and/or forces me to write where people can set their own finger attributes up to a certain number comes to mind. I'd have to dig around.

I could even fix the code presented from Mushcode to be more legible and better formed.

However.

I just looked for the "why you should use Evennia and not Mushlikes", the page with the cringe-worthy code, and couldn't find it. What I found instead were a series of fairly well-documented introductory documents. I admit I didn't look too hard, and my job all day puts me at odds with people who want to convince me that my preferred fill-in-blank (OS/Hardware Platform) is bad and that I should feel bad. I don't want to see that in my off time. It smacked me of system conceit which I know happens a lot in open source, even by accident (vis a vis @Ashen-Shugar's post, which assumes Rhost compatibility, because That's His Thing).

Structured programming languages are unarguably better, but I was surprised by what I read as a divisive, not bridging tone in that one, specific, particular document.

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tl;dr: Evennia and Ares are the right direction, period, no questions. Thenomain still doesn't like it when people misrepresent his favorite flavor of <fill in blank>.

@HelloProject said:

@Thenomain said:

All the time people complain that there is not enough ice cream that's not been done before, and you take them to a place that does burnt sugar and salted caramel and gelato made with real lilac, and they order vanilla.

Repeating an old idea does not mean it's not still very good. WoD By Night remains popular because of its popularity, as well as people's laziness. I don't think this is the hobby to count laziness as a cardinal sin, but we can still accept it for what it is.

But discouraging new ideas by saying "The old ways work just fine" is pretty much just encouraging stagnation rather than growth.

I don't know what games you've been on, but I've never heard stagnation being encouraged by saying "the old ways work just fine"**. I think that the Cult of the New is almost as dangerous as the Cult of the Old. The stereotypical young person sees the stereotypical old person as unwilling to change because new things are scary. The stereotypical old person sees the stereotypical young person as ignorant and with no regard to things that are that way for a reason.

They're both right.

Keeping things the way they are is correct because we understand how it works.

Ignoring the way things are is correct because it's the only way to understand how new things work.

I think anyone who clings to either one of these ideas is misguided, because we need both order and chaos, tradition and innovation. Whether or not people realize it, tradition is the foundation from which innovation grows.

So yeah, make all the WoD By Night games as you want. Innovation will happen regardless. And if this doesn't convince you, I have an ever-growing Github of Mux softcode to show you.

** Major Edit: Yes, I can think of new ideas being blocked under the banner "we don't need change", but I concede this kind of thought with the caveat that pushing change for the sake of change is dangerous to something that works, just like sticking doggedly with something that works is dangerous to the same working systems.

Or in other words, yes I agree that "no you can't this because we've never ever done that before!" is stupid, but it's just as stupid as "wheels are dated; fuck wheels!"

Acceptable is, "No you can't do this because it goes against the kind of game we're running right now." Acceptable is, "You know, the wheel sucks in this environment; have you ever thought about treads? Oo, let's do some stuff with legs!"

(I love that robot dog thing. Creepy as hell.)

Change to meet a demand, to solve a problem, or to play and discover new things. Don't just change; innovate.

@auspice

The second, perhaps even meaner and funnier thing our DM did to us:

To identify a magic item, the magic-user has to use it as intended, even fakely.

Our magic-user was an illusionist gnome. Just let those two words together sink in a little bit.

He tried on a hat, the GM said he didn't know what it was, and that was that.

What we didn't know that it was a Hat of Feeblemind. The gnome illusionist's intelligence was reduced to 3.

And the player kept playing a gnome who did outrageous and sometimes slightly random things, and stopped casting spells, and for at least three hours-long sessions nobody noticed. I think it was even longer.

As players, we were so very blind. So fun.

I would, to be honest, like to make sure that someone knows where the line is and to say "this is the line". The line being: Spamming, too much beating of a dead horse, when the chance of any productivity concerning a topic has gone well beyond the pale.

All of these things are roughly the same thing: Keep things moving. Be hateful, be nice, but if you're repeating yourself then you're probably done. If people complain that you're repeating yourself, that's bordering on the spam.

That's my view of things.

Cod or Cod 2: The Coddening?

@arkandel said in Regarding administration on MSB:

It's definitely a Hog Pit issue. I haven't had time yet to read that forked thread but I'll say this - if the posters surprise me and it's a nice civil discussion we'll move it to the Mildly Constructive section. I'm not holding my breath on that one though.

Well sure, because now that it's in the Hog Pit there's no social cues to be considerate. "I towed your car to the south side; it might be okay there, but if it gets broken into I won't be surprised." No kidding?

Ah well.

SOLUTION:

Dear Windows Users,

Don't use TextPad to code for UNIX.

Use NotePad++

Heh.

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The slightly longer story:

The reason for the #-1 Invocation Limit was because the upped limit wasn't being read by the game on startup/restart, but parts of the netmux.conf file were.

The reason for that wasn't because of permissions (my #1 guess) but eventually remembering that @ZombieGenesis was using winscp to upload the edited file, which means editing on Windows, which means using Windows-encoded returns.

So the older parts of the file were being read by the game fine, but the things added new were not.

NP++, UNIX-style EOLs, and viola, everything is running smoothly.

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ZG: Remember to un-alias 'm' from 'page'.

There, there, over there, do you see where I'm pointing?

@surreality

Ask if you can.

If you can't, ask someone else who has if they did. If they did, it's almost certainly okay.

Credit if you know.

If there is a license, follow it.

Credit changes in the credits.

But ultimately, if it feels wrong, don't do it.

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edit: Unless the code is noted otherwise, anyone can have any code I've ever touched. Even if we don't get along, I don't care. It's code, not part of my identity, and I'd rather games be enjoyable for those who run and play it than someone massaging my ego.

Actually that's a trick, my code helping anyone enjoy a game massages my ego. I'm honored by anyone who wants to use it.

We're back.

Sure, it took a lot of pushing from Echoes in the Mist, but anyone who wants live weather and live "is the moon visible?", follow the directions at the original Github location at the first post in this thread.

Thanks.

@somasatori said in Bump In The Night: A Chronicles of Darkness MUX:

(It's raining in California, by the way. Thought everyone should know.)

That reminds me: Weather is fixed.

I have to implement the final piece, the "Can You See The Moon Right Now" calculator, but it's otherwise done.

@faraday said in Regarding administration on MSB:

I’m done tilting at windmills for awhile.

You keep saying this.

—

@bored

Repetition is a normal risk of getting old no matter what you do.

The power of you having seen these beats before is that you can help educate people who haven’t.

@Cheesegrater

Clearly that book written in (checks) 1995.

Wait, really? 1995? There's got to be an appendix containing languages PHP is better than.

Like Mushcode.

And Pascal. Just sayin'.