Hi,
Long time WORA/MU Soapbox lurker here, shedding some light on my past toons before engaging with the community:
Albel @ FiranMUX
Daranos @ FiranMUX
Dynn @ FiranMUX
Vyse @ FiranMUX
Errand @ Drums in the Dark
Dimitar @ Drums in the Dark
Devon @ Eternal Crusade MUSH
Talen @ ArxMUSH
Rook @ ArxMUSH
Emyrion @ IthirMUSH
Really happy to see this here, @Tehom ! I am saddened I never had the time to help invest it in helping the codebase come along in the early days so I'm hoping by opening it up you'll see others with more time be able to.
Kudos.
@vulgarkitten I made @stabeest win me a unicorn from the arcade. That's basically the obsession level Talen has with them on Arx at this time. Does this count?
It's a little known in communities that I play that I'm both a "professional" (as in, gets paid) software engineer, as well as a full time software engineering student at a university, and I still have these moments of just utter frustration and complete self-doubt. It's fine to have those feelings. It's normal.
There's a theory calling the Dunning-Kruger effect whereby, essentially, people who have less experience in a particular field overestimate their own ability until a point in which suddenly their greater experience indicates to them that they are completely swamped by the additional discovery of so much more that they have to learn. While I don't believe it's the case for everyone, it can be disheartening, whether you think you've got this in the bag or not. It's a whole process of trial and error, doubt and elation, misery and excitement. Some of these phases are longer than others and that changes on every project you undertake.
I'll also echo the sentiment others have made here: reading someone else's code is extremely hard to do. It's their own attempt at solving a problem where there are many ways to do it. You're not just learning to read syntax, you're attempting to think like them. In the early days of Arx, I offered my time to @Tehom for a bit, and though I couldn't provide much time to help in the short time I did I noticed we have very different approaches to similar problems. Not only this, we're all still learning as we go, and I venture Tehom's looked back at some of his own stuff and gone 'oh my god what did I do' but can't immediately change some of this. So, don't take everything verbatim as the best way to do things. Feel free to be different, but when you need inspiration look to what works for you. It may be a completely different project, or a similar one.
tl;dr: programming is hard. it's going to suck. do what you want to do and how you want to do it. feel free to ask for help when you're stuck. it may or may not be helpful to you. that's more than fine. don't give up because you don't think you can do it. persist. it'll feel so fucking great when you've achieved something. even a small thing. just do a little piece at a time. each win will power you through the next slog. then you'll win again. dream big. start small.
Now, what about tabs or spaces, camelCasing or PascalCasing, Li-nux or Lin-ux and more!
LET THE BLOODSPORTS BEGIN
@Pondscum said:
You're looking for this:
https://github.com/wyrdathru/TheCreationist.
https://github.com/wyrdathru/TheCreationist/releasesIt was Daranos' player that wrote the program and I'm not sure if he's still supporting it/working on it or not. It was much better than A2A however, which was the standard 16 colour one which everyone used.
I know Daranos' player reads this forum, so you could put maybe put a shout out for him.
Thanks for chiming in, @Pondscum !
I was slowly pushing toward adding in support for different MU* engines and automated colouring via patterns and rules, but since I've barely touched any text-based games lately, it's been less of a priority.
@Tempest , I used it on Windows 10 recently but only for the briefest few seconds. If you (or anyone else still using it?) have any problems and/or feature requests, just nudge me on MSB or log a ticket on Github.
@Griatch What's the state of Ainneve? I've been out of touch with the whole engine and associated projects. The Evennia minimum viable game is great for developers, but contribs for basic systems commonly found are always welcomed by games at laucnh, especially if highly configurable to suit their needs. There's major benefit to this, but obviously one-size-fits-all systems can be a nightmare if poorly designed, so need to be highly modular.
My long term ambition to help the project is feed back contribs with enough flexibility through configuration for regularly used systems, which I know some people have done, and I think is highly valuable.
This is a lot of dev work, so I'll mull over other potential ideas to assist in the accessibility for new starters.
I have never felt so conflicted about which side I should take on an argument.
+who hackathon starts midnight, only drunk contestants will be allowed, and all vulgarities expressed are not the opinions of the developers themselves but the opinions of 30+ years of frustration.
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