Posts made by Volund

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.

@skew
It isn't compatible with TinyMUX. It's compaible with only PennMUSH and RhostMUSH. And Rhost could use more testing.

Sorry.

Yeah, a fair handful of people I've encountered do like making aliases for accessing inconveniently named channels (Evennia handles this natively with the MUX-style addcom) but I've yet to encounter someone who made a custom +who. They're almost certainly out there on the games I help manage, but I only notice when someone asks for HELP with something...

I don't make it a habit of scanning people to see who has softcode on them.

@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.

@acceleration
The PennMUSH code for nWoD is pretty much complete. It's on my Github https://github.com/volundmush/mushcode under the storyteller section.

It was originally made for nWoD, not Chronicles of Darkness, and I'm having trouble remembering how complete the conversion to CoD is.

The code for Exalted 2e and 3e works fine.

Progress on Evennia is slowed drastically at the moment. In fact most of my coding is. My grandma recently went into a nursing home when her alzheimers/dementia got to be too much, drying up my only source of income - my 'job' was taking care of her. Now I need to rapidly learn a lot of life skills and get a job. I'm too stressed out to code much at the moment. I suspect things will bounce back up within a few months. Probably won't have as much free time, but I'll get this done. Eventually.

@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.

@Cobaltasaurus
MUX? It... probably will not. I haven't actually every touched TinyMUX. However it relies heavily on a lot of advancements that were only recently added to Penn and Rhost.

Some aspects of it might work. It might be ADAPTABLE with some work, and sacrificing some features... but it's currently designed explicitly for Penn and Rhost. There's even some 'branching code paths' that differ depending on which you are running it on. Doesn't currently account for MUX at all...

@Wavert
Heh! The flagship game for this code is MCM... and you called it. Well there is Brave New World. I've also been helping some kind of Dissidia, or Final Fantasy like game that was inspired by Final Kingdom get off the ground? Several projects cropped up that needed a bit of help or encountered bugs (solved a lot of them thanks to said projects!). Really excited to see so many MUSHes appear. The hobby seems incredibly niche and this helps keep it going. One of the reasons I released this code... wanted to make running a game more accessible. MUSHcode is arcane, frustrating, limited, doesn't get along with any kind of development environment I know of, and there's not many people to call upon if you need help troubleshooting it.

As a note!

Stomped a lot of Rhost bugs in the last month. Made a ton of commits, fixed some serious bugs. I might start calling this 2.1 soon? Something like that.

Admittedly, changelogs, patch notes, and stuff, is a weakness of mine. Trying to work on a style/system to adhere to.

@Glitch
Wow, didn't know it was this popular. I'm flattered!

@ThatOneDude
Fate, huh? Not sure what that entails yet although I have heard of that system. If it's free to download somewhere then I can totally look into it.

The more people use the issues tab on github, the more I can fix things.

Just recently got Exalted 3e cleaned up. Haven't had any reason to touch Chronicles of Darkness/nWoD 2e yet due to the main game that uses it seemingly being happy with it how it is.

Also still in the midst of making it Rhost compatible.

+district code has a few minor issues... I need to really re-think of how to handle delegated building. It is the one thing that the system is not terribly good at.

Also yes, MySQL.

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.

@NotaNumber said:

After waiting 5 days for someone to look at the app, the response I got was 'Writing your background this way does not help. In fact it makes me angry and want to dock you XP. I can't do that, but don't do this again. I will have more comments for you later.'

Would like to know who said that and for what character. 5 days is too long to wait to get a response like that. On the 5 day part I can only clench my teeth and sigh because nothing I have done in the past has ever lead to a well-oiled staff team (largely why I stay out of policies), but that kinda response is not so cool.

We have been attempting to clean up chargen. Mardukth just put up some extra guidelines of this sort.

@Thenomain said:

Anyone who doesn't go to online communities to avoid the politics,

Looks like I dropped by, largely due to @Griatch and the Evennia thread. Still hoping to avoid politics. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

I think this should speak for itself.

http://fubarp.crabdance.com:8000/sheet/2314/120

Yeah, it's pulling directly from my WIP Storyteller code. Hail Exalted 2.5e.

@TNP said:

So the next question would be, can they import an nWoD cgen into their game from someone else's? And how easy would it be for them to write one from scratch (which, granted, is not easy for Mux code either or more people would do it).

@Griatch said:

I'll leave this answer up to the MUSHers who are already using Evennia for WoD. Hopefully some of them will reply.

I'm working on EXACTLY THIS. And so far, so good.

But let's shine a little more light on exactly what that means.

Q) Can you run MUSHcode on Evennia?
A) No, but Python is objectively more powerful and widely supported than MUSHcode.

Q) Can you directly translate MUSHcode into Python code?
A) No, but much of the logic established in a MUSHcode project can be replicated in Python with considerable ease. That's not to say it doesn't take time.

Q) Can you import nWoD cgen from one game to another's?
A) Yes, although not necessarily the way you're thinking. In MUSHcode, you'd create an object, give it the right permissions, ensure the right attributes were admin-locked, make some rooms for chargen and call it good. maybe. The concept is similar in Evennia. Download some .py files, import them, link the proper commands into your default character cmdset (how commands are assigned to players) and you're good to go. The concept is similar, although the methods vary wildly.

Continuing the last question: Python is in fact BETTER than MUSHcode for this in a sense, because in MUSHcode you have to ask the questions 'well, this will run for TinyMUX, but what about PennMUSH or X or Y.' Python is just Python, there's no fifteen variations of Python, so in this sense you can MORE READILY take a project from one person's Evennia game and import it directly into another. The downside is that everyone's specific game implementation will be different - one person's idea of nWoD chargen might be entirely some commands, whereas MY idea of it involves an nWoDCharacter class that inherits from a StorytellerCharacter class that inherits from Evennia's Character class (StorytellerCharacter also being the foundation for Ex2Character and Ex3Character for Exalted...)

My personal approach to this is MONOLITHIC - I want my implementation to be fully self contained and standalone, so it may not be that easy to just 'add my nWoD stuff to some random Evennia game.' It's similar to how you'd basically build a game AROUND Thenomain's WoD code used at the Reach (at least I believe it's used there. Never been to the Reach.)

Also I am having GOOD LUCK with implementing things from Exalted and nWoD so far in my own style... and my style doesn't HAVE an extensive database of Charms, Gifts, Disciplines, etc, and all of their specific sub-rules. It's merely a toolset for constructing and managing sheets with some extra features. If anything it will be -easier- to design lists of powers and pre-req checking, automated XP spends, and that kind of thing in Python. That will require more skill than I presently HAVE, but I'm learning as I go along.

Furthermore, it has proven not at all impossible to import a PennMUSH database using my MUSHcode implementation of Exalted and nWoD directly into Evennia. It took me just one day to figure out a good way to parse the PennMUSH outdb and read data into Evennia. Other MU* server flatfiles might be more challenging but the concept can likely be re-applied.

@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.

@ThatGuyThere said:

Evennia will go one of two ways either the first few games that use it will take off and it will become the new thing in wade use, or the first few games won't attract a big audience and it will become a niche code base like other MU-code replacements from over the years.

If you ask me, all of MU*'ing is pretty niche right now. In fact from my perspective the hobby is losing steam. Also, if you look at at the existing codebases it's much like Linux - there's a million distros all slightly different, some drastically different. There's Penn, Rhost, and TinyMUSH, there's TinyMUX which is not the same as TinyMUSH, there's MUX2, there's MOO and ProtoMUCK. For MUDs there's stuff like Circle and Smaug and tons of derivatives of each other...

What exactly is a 'mainstream' MU* server anyways?

Actually since Evennia uses Twisted and the portal can easily support all kinds of connections, I'd imagine that it's totally possible to invent all kinds of APIs to connect and do major editing, down the road. Not yet sure how that would work but it seems theoretically possible.

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.

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...)