Best posts made by Thenomain

@HelloProject said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

@Thenomain

I'm not saying you aren't, just saying that it's not really a player problem. Players are kind of at the mercy of coders.

And coders are at the mercy of players and staff. Do you think that a coder who says, "I'm going to code this way no matter what you think?" is going to have a successful game? There are better systems to code under and they are not anywhere near as popular, if they can even get off the ground. That is not a code issue, that's an end-user situation, a player issue.

@Ominous said in Eliminating social stats:

@Ganymede That is a valid and understandable position. What if everyone got one character that was solely their own, but the rest were available to be played by anyone?

I call these NPCs. I will pose bartenders, cops, random street people, all reacting to the events in the room. Often it's appreciated, but sometimes people find this to be invasive. (My usual response to that is: You are yelling loudly right outside a bar; what do you think is going to happen?)

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@faraday said in Eliminating social stats:

@Seraphim73 said in Eliminating social stats:

Certainly, you can type things like @faraday suggested, and I have, frequently. But there's something of an art (in my opinion) to showing the little cues like avoiding eye contact, a faint stutter or hesitation, that sort of thing, that suggest that a character is lying without blatantly saying so.

Those make better poses, admittedly. But also... then you're actually relying on the player to pick up on those subtle cues, instead of giving the player information that you think their character would realize.

This is where positive or informative metaposing comes in. Those who hate metaposing often don't realize that offering up insight to your character's brain, their intent and thoughts and foibles, is mostly a good thing.

It's when you use it to sass-talk other players that it's horrible.

@nyctophiliac said:

I'll be needing:

1. The whole code base started up from scratch

It sounds like you need a site admin to set up a game, plus the game. It's going to be very difficult to convince a stranger to do this much work for you.

@WTFE

You know, I just deleted a post that in part berated you for being unhelpful, using you as an example of what happens when people push for change via complaints then complain when people don't cater to them. Surprise! People don't cater to assholes, and it makes it harder to do the right thing!

This is me changing my mind and making a post just to point you out as someone who may know what they're doing but has no interest in helping the hobby.

When you get this way, you are no constructive, all criticism. Go you.

That is all.

@Huzuruth said:

@tragedyjones said:

If City of Heroes was returned to the world I would never talk to you ducks again.

It's on Steam.

I actually checked, you ass.

"Cheating" is a conditional phrase based on the local laws and policies of the game. Without knowing what people are doing, giving advice is difficult.

In my experience, issues of cheating of this sort are people breaking some sort of alts policy, such as "you're allowed only two characters".

Normally social engineering can scope out this kind of cheating, as people tend to have a specific voice in their writing style, a timetable in their login habits, and a circle of friends that notably overlaps. Sure, one player may be bouncing though a proxy for one character and not for another character, but it's doubtful their preferred RP partners don't.

Use these as tools to make a reasonable deduction.

I treat alt-hunting as more of an investigative, policing procedure, not an exact science. If I can get most of the players to accept "this is the rule, we can't be perfect so please don't make us care", then it probably won't be a problem.

Mac: BBEdit
Windows: Notepad++
Anywhere: Atom

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very late edit: I don't at all know what you're expecting, but you can open hundreds of files at once with these two. Atom even has a way to multi-file-edit fairly easily, and BBEdit's is a bit harder but still quite possible.

@BobGoblin said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

South Park MUSH.

You're posting to it.

@Hexagon

You assume that our code projects aren't three week cast-off projects. Just the way we planned.

@RnMissionRun

MXP is the other one I was trying to remember.

With all due apologies to those who developed it, Pueblo was not a great idea. The complexity of building a parser around an SGML standard (aka HTML) was too much too soon. I mean, who remembers VML? It wasn't the solution that we needed.

Of course, knowing is only half the battle. The other half is "right place, right time". The clunky RSS Feed, which did not age well, is recently being replaced by JSONFeed. This process took forever, not because nobody was interested but because the spark wasn't there. Lord knows that XML->JSON and visa-versa translation recipes have been out since—I'm guessing—JSON gained any popularity. And since JSON is so much easier to both encode and parse than XML, coders have been picking up JSONFeed as an RSS replacement at an amazing rate.

So sure, there are potential replacements, but we're sitting here saying that if only someone would do something to improve it. Myself included. Either eventually someone will (Faraday in Ares, Ashen-Shugar in Rhost, anyone in Evennia), or they won't.

I will say that one of the things I consider if I'm even going to try to code something is: Who will use this? Crow about Pueblo or MXP as much as you want, it never made it into Mush-user-style clients because nobody convinced us why we'd want it, and to do that someone has to use it.

The point? Something can't just be good, it has to be used.

For those too young to remember, Betamax was far superior than VHS in so many ways, yet VHS won because VHS was used.

Okay, done rambling.

@ghost

What the fork?

(I’ve started watching The Good Place. It’s got me hooked.)

@faraday said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

@Thenomain I'm curious how you define "immediate feedback tools". Is changing code in a text editor in the server shell and typing @reload in the game not immediate?

I've had to think about this a bit, and here's what I think.

• You can't do the old trick of testing your code in development in that bizarre but delightful way Mushes allow you to localize code. If you make a change, it's to the server. (New tactic: Lock the code until it's tested.)
• You have to have server access to test code. You can't test concepts on someone else's server ("how does Penn do this, again?"), and you can't do it without your own complete server installation.

The problem with my communications here is that I'm talking in what sounds like absolutes, but is a matter of degrees. I don't have the language to explain what I'm thinking of, only examples. As you and @Griatch are taking those examples as specific issues and/or complaints, cross-purposes are being attained.

Let me give one more example.

Yes, I have to install the entirety of Python to play around with it (let's ignore online tools for a moment), but I can get into a limited development shell to, well, I could create a whole Python program in it, but it's not designed for that. It's designed to "play".

This is not about toys, this is about exploration, about learning, and about accessibility.

This is the specific part I was talking about earlier that I think needs help to make Evennia more accessible. (does not say to run vitualenv first, nor how)

This is my idea about what "accessibility" is about.

But for actual game devs [...]

What is an "Actual Game Dev"? A Cobalt who wants to build a quick, loose game about supernatural life in Forks, Washington and knows how to build but little else? Castle D'Image, which had no code systems to speak of? I know you don't mean this term negatively, and don't even imagine you would use it that way if you did, but this is a limiting statement. "Evennia and Ares are only for Actual Game Devs."

I do feel bad about stating it that way, but couldn't think of another way to get across that point. My inner editor is a jerk.

@Arkandel said in Project X:

How would you implement places on a web interface?

Something similar (but better) than folders in a list-view, with or without the expansion arrow. You create an embedded window that until you 'join' you can only see the people there. Once you join, you get a secondary discussion window, a "spawn" if you will.

@three-eyed-crow said in Make MSB great again!:

In my ideal world, the threads in the ad forum become locked to except to the original poster (who can theoretically post updates) and the board admins (who can theoretically do necessary maintenance and link things). Nobody else posts in them.

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@faraday said in Make MSB great again!:

So we have the ad thread, for the ad. Then if folks want to discuss the game, good and bad, that can go into a review thread.

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Now here's a train I can get on.

@faraday

I've been using: Mushes, Mushlikes, Mushcode. The last was more popular long ago.

Also, long ago about half the mushers coded. Code was simpler, and the requirements to entry were lower.

@Derp said in Incredibly Stupid Question Re: Object Limits:

@Thenomain said in Incredibly Stupid Question Re: Object Limits:

@ixokai

Once someone used actual Mush objects to try and replicate a file system, with folder objects and data objects inside other folder objects.

Nevermind this is not how actual file systems work.

At least he was happy about it, I guess.

For those of us that have to go and poke at other people's random code, an actual sensible file system would be priceless.

I feel the same way about some programming objects!

@ganymede said in Make MSB great again!:

@arkandel said in Make MSB great again!:

Maybe all you have is the glimmer of an idea, maybe you have a fully coded game but no staff, but where do you go to find collaborators?

I don't think a Classified section is a bad idea. There, you can ask for help, players to join your group on a game, etc.

http://musoapbox.net/category/12/mu-questions-requests

It gets very little love. I've seen more questions in the Constructive forum than here.

@faraday said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

Anyway, yeah - long ago coding was more common. But I'm not trying to get back to the MU*s of yesteryear where everyone was making Falcon Controllers. I'm addressing the use cases of the types of games I see and play on, where you've got (if you're lucky) one coder or an admin determined to learn enough to limp along.

So Ares' goal is different than Evennia's. I imagine that Ares will also present the more typical simplified installation requirements of Mushes.

We could call Ares something different. How about ... hmm ... a MULORG? MERINGUE? MIP? MUM, Multi-User Mush?

@Arkandel said in nWoD2.0 Support Code?:

Introducing new toys is usually harder once people's habits are set unless you're actually offering something shiny they didn't know they wanted until they had it.

@Cobaltasaurus' Events.

... I'm just saying this because it was a toy she coded for herself, thinking that people might like it, and now it seems to be a must-have at least on WoD games, and hopefully on every games.

This is a pure vanity post saying that awesome things come from everywhere. Thinking too hard about it can be what kills it.

@faraday

I see a forum as a place for historical record, and besides I don’t see a game as defunct just because someone hasn’t advertised for it in six months. The logic doesn’t fit to me.

I also think it’s adding work when none is needed. If someone reads an ad dated 2015, is it really that disconcerting if there’s no game there anymore? A problem looking for a solution? That’s how I see it.