Best posts made by Thenomain

Well let's examine why people don't look at characters any more.

(Pun not intended, but I left it in when I noticed.)

It's because we, the general "we", pose longer and more descriptive than we have before. Sure some people were always excited to pose 2 paragraphs, but now we get our outfits, mood, accent, and body language as they happen, sometimes repeated when new people enter the scene. I wouldn't be surprised if on the whole we write more than when we had more rotating descs.

I am very bad at scene-sets, but love the touches that I can and other people add throughout whatever situation the scene is about. I know that I'm probably tapped for ideas when I stop.

I just store in an SQL table. So much more satisfying.

Once @Chime told me that it had hit several gigabytes, but it had been recording every pose in the OOC room.

For five years.

@mietze

Yes.

That was my point.

That it isn't about politics.

This is a lot more effective than taking a knee during a sporting event, but then I can't say that the African American peoples of America have tried the "look, look here, see where the beatings and injustice is, I can prove it" and it hasn't worked yet. Women have been doing the same thing for just as long, and now is their time. About fucking time.

I'm just hoping that the social justice, with or without the warriors, continues to spread to all people of our Great Experiment, the American Melting Pot. I'm hoping that the fire lit under Hollywood is just the start of that flame finally catching.

It's only been a few hundred years of people trying.

No big.

(late edit: grrr, anger, fuel of impotent rage)

@faraday said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

Side note: I'm not convinced that people ever used descs as much as we'd like to believe, even back in the "good ol' days". I've had an @adesc on every character I've ever played, and it didn't get triggered as much as I would expect, even way back when. So I think these alternatives have filled a void that was always there to some extent.

I've set a desc notification as soon as I discovered @adesc and back in the day it would be triggered at least once per scene. There were two types of people: People who would look as soon as you entered, and people who would look after you posed something even slightly controversial.

Nowadays I see it get triggered a little under once per pose-in.

--

@autumn said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

@thenomain One other possible contributing reason:

• We started writing longer descs, and people aren't willing to read them.

I don't buy this one. The extensive two-paragraph-desc has been around since the DarkMetal or Paris:FdM days, with it not being uncommon to see it even longer. This was along with multidescers and man, people have always lo-o-ooooved to write!

In a hobby about writing, I can't consider this strange, and that's why I don't buy it.

Along those lines, I suspect that having short-descs show up in +glance, and later in default room views, probably contributed, too.

I will, however, buy this one, even at full price. I'd be tempted to buy one for a friend.

@ganymede said in AresMUSH Updates:

@auspice @faraday

I'm still writing up my space opera game's background, but I really, really want to get back to this so hard right now.

So not Mass Effect.

I'm asking for a friend.

You monster.

Thenomain will die in seven days, apparently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jOwwIZ3Ygw

@faraday

Sorry. After the fourth time of saying how nothing is perfect and chocolate isn’t vanilla, I wasn’t sure what the goal was. My fallacy may have been mistaking repetition for passion, and if anyone is not staffing to their passions then I feel very sorry for them.

There may be no wrong answers, but as someone focused in usability, some answers are more correct than others. It’s harder because those situations change, but often share similarities. Like vanilla and chocolate.

I know a lot of people think of discussions like this as pointless, but I’m not one of them. There may be no conclusion, but each time we hit this level of preference versus utility, I become a better game designer. We also learn more about the culture as a whole, as it is always changing. I don’t think anyone can run a game well without even a subconscious understanding of this.

Exitformat is what you're looking for. While I don't know Penn, I will give you a Mux answer:

iter( %0, ansi( if( strmatch( <something about loc( %i0 )>, <is private> ), xh, n ), name( %i0 )), , %r )

However, again in Mux, rooms may not have permission to see if a room is or isn't on the main grid, so you may be forced to create your own "privileged" user-defined function.

&ufunc.room_on_grid: cand( hastype( %0, ROOM ), <however you determine this> )

Then your room parent's @exitformat can:
iter( %0, ansi( if( room_on_grid( loc( %i0 )), n, xh ), name( %i0 )), , %r )

n.b., most of this is from memory and may need tweaked.

(The possible secret: For exits, loc( <exit> ) returns the dbref of the room at the other end. For the room at this end, which is sometimes needed, it's home( <exit> ).)

@tempest said in Shameless Self-Promotion: Extra Life 2017:

What are you guys playing!?

7th year. 7 Days to Die. 7 streamers. Okay, 5 streamers.

Or is Theno going to code MUs on stream?

Do you want to hear how Theno swears? I bet Ganymede swears better, but I can swear. I know the swearing.

--

edit: It's Saturday, not in 7 days. That was a play on title.

@ganymede said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@thenomain said in Regarding administration on MSB:

But who devolves it into Hog Pit territory? And what is the law when it does?

I don't know. I would like to say that "offending" posts could be split off into a separate Hog Pit topic, leaving the unoffending posts alone, but that might require too many bureaucratic resources.

Would you encourage a bad enforcement because you don't have the resources?

I don't think you guys have a fair answer, which sucks, but you guys are trying to shift behavior to a goal that I don't think is possible without more bureaucratic resources. Or as @faraday said, you have the wrong tools for the job you're currently trying to do.

I did a copy/paste from

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thenomain/GMCCG/master/4%20-%20XP%20and%20Costs/4b%20-%20XP%20Costs.txt 

and it mashed everything together.

It converts leading tabs to a space. I assume it does the same to leading spaces.
(My code style is to leave trailing spaces for space-formatting before a newline.)

It really, really gets confused if you copy from the non-raw part of GitHub, e.g.:

https://github.com/thenomain/GMCCG/blob/master/3%20-%20Stat%20Setter/3b%20-%20Stat%20Command.txt

• Benefit over Muxify: It doesn't get choked up when a \* is in the middle of a line. (Muxify is fine with this in shorter chunks but not the amount of code I tend to throw at it.)

• Drawback over Muxify: It needs - to know where a block ends.

@insomnia

https://goo.gl/images/iSmvMv

@ganymede said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@thenomain said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Would you encourage a bad enforcement because you don't have the resources?

I don't think this is a fair line of inquiry.

I think it's the only fair line of inquiry (sorry, hyperbole struck, but I feel that it's an extremely fair line of inquiry). The resources to accomplish your goals are entirely in your hands. It would be nice if (and when, as it happens often) the users help along, but its up to staff on any game or board to be the masters of those resources.

But inconsistent enforcement is a concern, not a certainty; it's not a matter of encouraging bad enforcement.

If it's a concern enough for you to mention it, it's a concern enough for you to try and resolve it before it becomes an issue.

@kumakun

Muxify blocks by looking for a non-whitespace character in the first character position. The core drawback from this is forcing a certain code methodology (i.e., you cannot have non-indented code), but if it's easier than sensing for @, &, /*, #, or EOD, then I don't think it's a bad forced methodology. Python gets away with much stricter indenting rules.

--

edit:

@faraday : He means in the first character position. Right now to define an end of block, you need to put - in the first character position.

e.g., the following input:

this is a test
within a test
  within a test
-
This is another test.
- This is a third test
-Fourth test--now with pretend em-dashes!

creates this output:

this is a test within a test within a test
This is another test.
This is a third test
Fourth test--now with pretend em-dashes!

@@
@@ Formatted with Mu-Format
@@ 2019 Lemuel Canady, Jr
@@ https://github.com/lcanady/mu-format
@@

--

edit edit:

Another suggestion: Put the output in an input pane so you can select-all and not get the whole web page.

I’ll be getting Kickstarter exclusive updates on the documentation?

@ixokai

Alright, here's the world I'm building. I'm going to post just the introduction to the world-building document (huge props to @Auspice, who is also acting as a sounding board). I'm not doing this for commentary on the particular Earth I'm constructing, and I don't think that's going to answer your questions, but it will explain where I'm coming from.

--

***Big Block of Text***

It is Earth. It is exactly Earth, with perhaps some adjustment to accomodate
magic, but until the history of our Earth changes, it is 100% exactly what you
see when you look out the window.

Starting now, this instant, the second you read this, you are gone. Everyone you
know is gone. Every human being on the planet, and possibly every animal, is
gone. Whatever they're wearing, whatever they're carrying, it's gone. Cars,
planes, scooters, cabins, chairs, computers, food, power plants, all of them
remain and continue on as they were the moment before.

Humankind is gone. Not dead, just...gone.

What there is, instead, are elves, orcs, dwarves, sprites, pixies, centuars,
fantasy races from no particular sources. There are also humans from these
worlds, or this other world or...we really don't know.

THEY have replaced US, scattered across the globe where WE used to be.

But they don't know where they come from. Not really. They might remember who
their family is, but they don't know their culture. They might remember the
calendar, but not the holy days. Their memory has become swiss cheese, but it's
mostly their culture that has been stripped from them. One might remember the
name of a god once worshiped, but another wouldn't. One pixie might imagine they
belong living high in the trees, but not that the hellscape of trolls who hunted
them to near extinction.

WE outnumbered THEM, by almost a thousand to one.

Our world is an alien landscape, filled with stuff, with junk, with magical
technology, with things they can figure out how to work (a car isn't that hard
to work out) and not (a computer would be). Their world immediately starts to
fall apart without the knowledge of maintaining it. Planes crash. Power plants
burn, or hit critical meltdown. The world hits a form of apocalypse. THEY do
THEIR best, which is not enough. But THEY survive.

--

Important notes:

• No Gods. (Only Man? Er.)
• I'd like it if science were science and math is math as we understand them. I'm a bit of a Neil Degrasse-Tyson fan that way.
• I'm not talking about the world, yet, just how to make these fantasy races deal with OUR Earth, but I still want magic to keep some spice to it.

@ixokai said:

What unformatter do you use, Thenomain?

I started in my own editor, then switched over to Muxify. If you're getting mail complaints, this is my older unformatter.

To use Muxify with this stuff, you'll need to do three things:

1. Grep edit ^-- to \\ -- and possibly comment `* ... *' around my infamous notes to myself.
2. Indent everything but the first line of an attribute.
   2a. Sometimes you'll have to comment out 'test' code, too.
3. BEWARE: I do use c.<xxx>\* sometimes, where the * is literal! Muxify doesn't like this. I cannot help that yet.

@Bobotron said:

Attribute trees are love.

Meh. I prefer my own solution. But then, doesn't everyone prefer what they prefer.

RL Peeve: I pull off the impossible and nobody is around to appreciate it.

Okay, so it was just a moderately complex SQL query, but it's still damn impressive. I'm running it over and over in different ways to amuse myself.

@ganymede said in Potential Game / Temperature Read:

@auspice said in Potential Game / Temperature Read:

I approve of anything with cards (look I own like, 80+ decks okay).
But I'm not sure on the Victorian era setting.

Then don't. It's just a setting. CF can really be applied to any time or place.

But cards are important. I think random PCs + random cards = fun and mayhem. Make it a wacky post-apocalyptic world where your enemies are robots, but not cool Cylons or deadly IG-88s, but instead WALL-Es. Nothing but WALL-Es.

Have you looked into the d20 version of Gamma World? The concept is that three other sci-fi-like realities crash into our own. It's very card-heavy for the powers, and the system is pretty generic d20 so probably can get tossed for something else.

@Derp said:

OR, do them in a temproom, which would theoretically make recalling the poses there impossible once its destroyed.

If they are logged, they can be recalled. It's the security that keeps things from getting out of hand, things that need to be taken into account no matter how the information is recorded. So log the whole game already.

I don't think it's a horrible idea, given the "security" caveat, and the security is going to be part of the game culture. The original post (or original poster-by-proxy) probably doesn't realize they are requesting this, but it's the only way to make it work.

I can think of many ways to make this safer, some of which have been touched upon. "That room only" and "last 10 poses", yes. You can even make the logger forget anything older so that nobody else (staff) can pull the information.

Even "that room only" depends upon determining "that room" to be more unique than the dbref. With how often dbrefs get re-used thanks to temprooms and jobs, the chances that you'll end up in a temproom that has been logged before isn't enough to zero to say it's secure.

My security feature: Turn it on only by request, be noisy about it, and remove anything logged when it's turned off. Automatically turn off if the last person leaves the room. I would use this as an easy way for the game to generate wiki-friendly scene logs, but catching up on poses would be a nice secondary feature.

I would say the rest of you are over-thinking it, but in truth it's because I've been thinking about this for years already and that's how I would do it.