Best posts made by Volund

Hey all!

Got a present for everyone. I told @Thenomain about it but I'm still making my way through the threads on this crazy-awesome place. Maybe he's posted about it already but I can't find it.

Have you ever looked at MUSHes such as Multiverse Crisis, Megaman MUSH (M3), Super Robot Taisen, the now-defunct Videoland, Battle Fantasia, or various superhero and Transformers games and thought 'I would love to make one of those but it's a LOT OF WORK?' Well, it was a lot of work because before now all the code those sorts of places ran wasn't really shared.

https://github.com/volundmush/mushcode

If the readme is tl;dr (I hope not, since it contains install instructions!) here's a brief synopsis.

Admin tools for tracking players by accounts/alts, softcoded +Help and +news system. A modernized BBS made to resemble Myrddin's that can import from Myrddin's. A Groups/Organizations/Guilds/Factions system that can be used with @lock very effectievly. Softcoded +radio channels. A (rather complicated to setup unfortunately) scene-logging and scheduling system that integrates with Mediawiki (kudos to Mercutio for that), my own simplified take on an Anomaly-like Job system, and much more.

There is even a fairly simple system in place for running Exalted 2e and New World of Darkness 2e tabletops, provided immersion is not the objective and Storytellers oversee character creation (there is no database of game rules and powers, just tools to mark things down on an approved sheet...). The dice roller and sheet display are some of my best works. Exalted 3e coming soon.

All freely available.

Using this package, Brave New World (a new Superhero game at BraveNewWorldMush.com 9999) sprang up out of nowhere in the course of a week or two. Most of that week was on building the grid and writing policies. They're already quite populous and everyone's having a blast.

So now I feel confident enough to advertise it!

The main support is aimed at the latest (bleeding edge, since it depends on a few things I requested the Penn devs add) PennMUSH, but RhostMUSH is also tentatively supported. I say tentatively because while I've made it with Rhost in mind, I don't have much feedback on Rhost yet and a few things I -know- don't work yet, like +finger or the SToryteller sheets. (I need to recode those using printf instead of align...)

I am interested in the potential of ADDING Penn/Rhost-like softcode capabilities to Evennia, but don't think I have the skills to do so yet.

personally I think it would be better served by re-inventing the concept of softcode in a fashion more manageable to modern coders. For instance, have a look at Second Life and the linden scripting language. While I'm not saying use THAT EXACTLY, it has a proper syntax, it allows for very creative building, and all the same sorts of things you'd want something to do in MUSHcode.

Consider that Evennia has a web app interface. It is totally possible to create tools that will allow for building rooms, setting code and programs, using such methods.

Just, nobody's made them yet.

I am currently working on a completely from scratch refactoring, redesign, and streamlining of my popular Penn/Rhost Code.

Warning, it's NOT ready to install yet.

And, at the same time, I've fixed pretty much every issue with 3.x's Rhost compatibility, and am working on finalizing a new release of for 3.5 which should be the last major bit of work I do involving that older code. I've abandoned maintaining the Storyteller stuff for 3.5 because 4.0 is already blowing it out of the water.

Here's my main goals for 4.0's version of the Codesuite:

• Rhost-only. Rhost, at the moment, has left Penn so far behind that I don't see any pros left to working with Penn. Sticking to just Rhost has lead to far simpler code, and being able to count on 32kb buffers instead of 8kb makes many things now possible.
• Account-based logins using Rhost's new login system. login to an account, select a character to play.
• Simple, streamlined, idiomatic coding style with fewer idiosyncracies. The code is much cleaner and more readable. I want to keep it that way. Easy to read, easy to maintain and modify.
• Less is more. Although the new code has trimmed out some extraneous features (like Divisions in factions), being simpler has enabled more flexibility in other ways.
• Minimal SQL involvement. Only roleplay logging and a few very similarly heavy topics require SQL. The BBS, Ticket Tracker, Storyteller data, etc, does not need SQL.
• Simple setup, largely unobtrusive installation that can get along with other code packages, if any.
• Full integration and accounting for some of Rhost's more peculiar and interesting features, like Reality Levels.
• Idiomatic handling of Rhost's security for new security model that covers collaborative building.
• Support for Storyteller games: Exalted 2e, Exalted 3e, Chronicles of Darkness 2e, World of Darkness 20th Anniversary, and perhaps some fan stuff. (Exalted vs WoD? Exalted x Chronicles of Darkness? Exalted Demake?). Maybe Scion 2e?
• (Highly experimental) MUD-style game SDK building on it. I want to see if Rhost can be used to make a spiritual successor to a Dragon Ball MUD I maintain and if I can generalize its features into a MUD SDK, I definitely will.

@Thenomain
You should speak up more!

... and I need to check musoapbox more.

I can attest that Evennia, while wildly different from Penn, Rhost, and other modern MUSH/MUX-style codebases, is quite easy to jump into, especially if you already know object oriented programming. While my own experiences have been plagued by constant bouts of RL dragging my interests elsewhere, or getting too involved in a MUSHcode project, or just having way too much fun RP'ing... going by my actual time spent hammering away at Python code? I've spent 3 months or so re-creating what took me six years to learn to do in MUSHcode (obviously not 24/7, this being everything I learned that eventually lead up to the polished code package - which still must have been hundreds if not thousands of hours), and am pushing it to heights that would have been completely untenable in MUSHcode.

I'm not going to say that Evennia is the best option for all cases. It may well be that the longest-standing MUX/MUSH games have little need of it, but Evennia opens new horizons and possibilities that are DEFINITELY worth exploring and working with. I feel that, if I can spend enough time working on this and can refine my own framework project ('Athanor' on my volundmush github, totally just me doinking around right now) I may be able to leave softcode behind entirely on day.

However, I will say that any newbies looking to get into making a MU* style game are probably better off spending their time learning Python than MUSHcode. As loyal as I am to Penn and Rhost communities, there's just no comparison, and you can count the amount of games that take full advantage of the MUSH-style on-line building these days on one hand. Most of the games I've helped make? Admin do not want people adding to the grid or making new channels or creating an NPC that wanders around the grid trolling people by listening to what they say and chatbotting back at them.

Hello all you happy people! First post from me ever. Didn't know people were talking about me over here. Hi!

@Griatch
Yeah, I succeeded at the database conversion. Now I must specify this was optimized for my needs. What I have is simply a bit of code that will read the Penn outdb, locate the lines for different objects and attributes and retrieve information like parent, location, type, owner, and every attribute. It ignores locks, flags, etc. This tool is, at the moment, pretty crude but has allowed me to automate the re-creation of an entire game grid and import lots of data from people using my MUSHcode suite. It can't really 'convert a whole game at the touch of a button and interpret all the softcode' or anything miraculous like that, but this should allow me to, for instance, convert Exalted MUSH's existing characters and accounts and grid provided I've already coded all the Exalted stuff in Python first.

@ThatOneDude
New blood! Drop by the IRC later!

@HelloProject
Sometimes it feels like I am one of a handful of softcoders out there who give a darn anymore. As was said earlier, most of the sane ones have moved on other things. While there's a lot of merit to the conventions that softcoding has forged and I'm quite fond of PennMUSH, I think having avenues like Evennia around as an alternative for a more modern approach is more than welcome. I'm very much enjoying converting my extensive softcode package. If you want, you can observe my rather n00bish development progress on my Github.

https://github.com/volundmush/mushcode for the old code I'm converting (which anyone's free to use if they want) and https://github.com/volundmush/athanor for the Evennia project.

Sorry for the double-deleted post, didn't realize I could edit a previous one. Not sure how you guys are quoting one another and gotta figure that out now.

Cannot pick and choose pieces?

I beg to differ! The only 'required' parts of the latest version are the files marked 'CORE'.

Everything else is optional, although a few things have inter-dependencies. For instance, there's a synergistic relationship between the Group System and the BBS. If you install both, then the Group Board System is enabled. But both systems work independently too.

@Thenomain said:

I know how to play Game X. I log into similar Game Y and man oh fucking man what the hell is going on here? Never mind!

Not really sure what anyone expects can be done about that.

I'm working on Evennia for several reasons.

The first is that I wanted to learn Python.

Second, I think that while MUSHcode is -capable- of doing some complicated stuff it is hardly OPTIMAL for it compared to modern languages like Python. Case in point, it took me less than a third the time to write a BBS similar to Myrddin's in Python once I knew how to Python at all.

Thirdly, many of the games I support don't care much about player building. Most of them are MUSHes of the same family as Megaman MUSH, where the objective is a roleplay setting where you grab some character and just go RP. The most people do is build some cool room with a desc to roleplay in. Almost nobody uses the available softcode tools for anything, so the loss of softcode for my purposes in the immediate future is not a big deal.

Fourth, the advantage of having a website that will be suited for things like reading or posting on the BBS, admin tools of countless varieties, and a webclient that does not suck will be a hundred more times approachable and easier to gain the attention and approvla of newbies to the hobby.

So what if it's difficult to randomly create an object to represent a dog that barks at people randomly while they enter the room? That can come later.

@Griatch

Also, and I don't know how much this is a factor in MUSH, but at least on the MUD side there are a ton of extension subnegotiation protocols that has been added to the Telnet protocol over the last 20+ years. They tend to be poorly documented (since there is no central standard) and various clients support subsets slightly differently or straight-out wrong. This is not making it easy for a server developer.

MXP, MCCP, Pueblo... GCMP? I don't know anymore, it really is that chaotic.

@acceleration

The port may take a while. I've been delayed by various RL factors including taking a small break from the port for sanity and then... then my grandma's mental health deteriorated further in the last few weeks so I'm dealing with some legal hoop-jumping. Should be back at it in a few days but I cannot really say for sure when it will be DONE done. I don't want to release code that isn't proven to work and as of yet have no data on how reliable anything written in Evennia will be.

@SG
Savage Rifts will be SO much easier to code. I love Rifts. I've never PLAYED Rifts directly, but I have attempted to code it once.

... it isn't something you can do in MUSHcode unless you want an exercise in horrible masochism. Use Evennia if you want to do normal Rifts.

Savage Rifts will be SO much better. I might do that myself! Heck I have half a mind to try something functional for normal Rifts when I get the Storyteller/Ex3/CoD stuff done to my satisfaction. ... Or I might do Eclipse Phase. Who knows.