Best posts made by Thenomain

@emmahsue

My favorite story beginning with Hello is “‘Hello’, she lied.” But then I looked for the source of this and ended up with a trailer for a movie starring Kathy Ireland that was pretty much soft core porn. Do not recommend.

@faraday said in MU Flowchart:

@Ashen-Shugar When I have some spare ponies I should look at that.

It always comes back to ponies, doesn't it.

@Griatch

I'm on my iPad, so this will be choppy with no quotation, but I feel a timely response is warranted.

• Being able to jump right in

There is a common document written very long ago that teaches you the four base objects you need to make a Mush. It helps you find the resources you need if you want to do more intermediate things. It explains the passed variables (%0, etc., which I know aren't called variables). It eventually tells you how to make a user defined command.

This is all you need to build a Mush. If you want to be more modern, TinyMUX allows you to have a pre configured database with something called the "Sandbox Globals Project". I make fun of the SGP for being horrible code, but it is clear and simple and is a fantastic learning aid. (I know the other Mushlikes have similar, but not the point.)

Mushes also have built-in help organized in several ways: By command and by topic. You may not remember that the function "iter()" is the functional "for each", but you can see it under "list functions" in help, and that mental trigger is invaluable. The Oracle web site does the same thing. The PHP web site does the same thing.

Sure, you get a little bit of that with Python, but we're not dealing with just Python here, we're dealing with to some of us an entirely new framework that just happens to use Python. Mind you, there are a ton of Python coding sites, which brings me to my conclusion to this part:

You have to learn Python to have any chance with Evennia. You don't have to learn Mushcode to have any chance with Mush.

• Time to Project

Both Oracle and PHP are insanely detailed to make it easy to set up. (I mean, that doesn't help in Oracle's case, but you take what you can get.) You can experiment within the environment and immediately see your results. Same with Python. Same with Mush. Install, run prompt, play.

I have no idea what's going on with Django or Virtualenv. Now that you mention the word, this was what I meant with "what do I do now?" I didn't see instructions on how to re-start the game. Yes, Mushcode involves a lot of word-of-mouth learning, but I'll tell you that everything I knew about Mushes were learned by reading. I now know things I never thought I would, and the non-Euclidean world of Mushcode has made my mind a breeding ground for the Elder Ones, but that's the problem with becoming a specialist in any field.

Those Elder Ones aren't helping when I run into the issues caused by the two of three frameworks that Evennia uses. Mush uses: one.

Making Mushes--sorry, an online multiplayer game--is simple. Evennia can have that middle ground. Here's how: Hire @Volund to write your installation and initial help documents. I don't know if he has the temperament(I don't!), but he's self-taught and taking off with the hobby possibilities and I keep hearing his name come up in the sentence "Volund helped me set up..."

If you're going for just the professional set, fine, but MySQL manages fine with the middle ground PHP manages fine, there's no reason Evennia can't except that the current project lead designer pushes back every time it's mentioned. That's fine, your project and all, but do accept that some of us are going to point out that it's not a hobby tool.

@krmbm said in MSB Peeves:

The goddamn animated gifs.

braces for the thread to be unreadable now

Some options for...

Safari: https://github.com/matsadler/deanimator
The Others: https://www.pcmag.com/article/345706/how-to-stop-animated-gifs-from-auto-playing-in-your-browser

I was just having a little nerdgasm about how easy this is to do in Discord. Step up your game, overworked browser coders!

@aria

GOOD FRIEND OF MINE (not really, but I hung out with him via friends a few times) Tony DiTerlizzi does very good young books. I don’t know how his YA is.

He does/did Spiderwick, of course, but I’ve wanted to check out his WonderLa books too.

@Ashen-Shugar

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

Sorry for the double post, but I did the first one on my phone and missed @Thenomain's reply. I agree that having a low "time to project" / "time to playing around" threshold is important. I think @WTFE brought up a great point earlier about bridging the gap from player to MUSH developer.

But I don't think that having the ability to edit code 'live' from inside the game itself is essential for either of these things.

In spite of my meandering thoughts, I was trying to, as you say and @WTFE says, talk about bridging the gap between player and developer. People like you and I can do some amazingly complex things in Mushcode, but it takes a level of effort that oustrips Mushcode's standard use case.

However, for that bridge, Mushcode is far more capable than Evennia, at present. A huge reason is because Mush has immediate feedback tools.

The documentation available for Mush is also, although ancient, creating and building on foundations. The documentation I've seen for Evennia is instructive but my small peeve that "how to start an existing game" was missing is exactly the kind of thing that frustrates me about it.

I also started by talking about things like Slack. I do not expect anyone to code in or for Slack, but if you want to set up a small to medium business communications mesh, Slack has a really good set of tools to do that with. They're not the first, not by a long shot, but they're one of the few that focuses on the user and not the product, which makes the product more usable.

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

@Volund is a great guy. He is also very knowledgeable about Evennia. And he originally learned to use Evennia from zero Python knowledge (he only knew mushcode) by reading our documentation and by asking questions in the community.

Emphasis mine. He's one of two people I know who've gone this route, but I see a difference between training coders (Evennia) and enabling end-users (Mush). The start of Mush's history was a game system that you could code your own Zork or Adventure; by coders for coders. But also for the college friends of coders. It colors everything done in the platform.

(See, I am trying to keep it somewhat on-topic. Unlike that @faraday person who is easily distracted by a shiny bit of -- oo, code!)

@Auspice

I like the sound balloons make when they pop.

@coin said in YA Fantasy Recommendations:

@groth said in YA Fantasy Recommendations:
it's basically Ready Player One for vampire/classical sci-fi/historical lit. but without the exposition being introduced like a brick to your face, thanks, RPO, Jesus.

I watched a review of the movie that talked a lot about the book.

“Ready Player One is less like a book and more like a speed-run of a book.”

I hadn’t laughed so hard in a while.

@Bennie said:

baRP

Someone add this to the lexicon.

@Ganymede said in Searching for Star Wars RPI:

@Thenomain said in Searching for Star Wars RPI:

This is a 100% valid way to do it. This is how we did it in WoD, and some people still do. There is nothing wrong with it, the question is always where to put the bulk of the work.

Will you make an Earthdawn chargen for me? @faraday is being mean.

You lie; @faraday is physically incapable of being mean.

@surreality

These days?

I'm just glad the term "hot take" has come around so we can distance ourselves from it.

@Arkandel said:

@Tyche said:

Martin should ring up Brian Sanderson. He'll have the series finished in three months and be halfway through a prequel and sequel by the end of the year.

It's not fair to compare a human being with an A.I. specifically developed to write novels, though. Come on.

I think Martin is an uplifted Killer Whale where the treatment is wearing off and he's busy more thinking about fish all day instead of writing, well, anything.

... What? Too soon?

@Ominous said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

@Gingerlily Clubs are awful, pretentious places that offer none of the relaxation, conversation, and fun that bars offer

Alternatively, bars are seedy places full of the kind of cliques and locals who don't really want you there.

I don't believe this for every "bar", but from your description of clubs, you're going to entirely the wrong clubs.

@Sparks said in Mac Client Recommendations?:

Regardless, I'm still working on Atlantis 2.0

For those of us who live on the edge, where can we find the latest builds?

Holy shit, you can resize the reply area?! Holy 21st Century, Batman!

I mentally subtitle this thread: Emmah Is Far Better At Writing Micro-Stories Than I Am.

@tragedyjones said:

Everyone is missing the point here that "Actively Oblivious" is the best merit.

I was pretending it didn't exist.

Generally they're on the wiki of the game you logged them from. I don't know of a repository for every log on every game that anyone cares to upload about. I think that'd be a little crazy.

@WTFE

So now, a literal shrug.