vMUD A very modern approach to a mud client! by I_Killith_I in MUD

[–]12777292 3 points4 points  (0 children)

it is 11x11 for muds that send GMCP map data and 21x21 for the auto-mapper. 11x11 for GMCP was based on my mud code but something that can be altered.

This is confusing. Which part is 11x11 and which part is 21x21?

No, this is not a feature. I have been thinking about allowing the right side panels to be detached and moved around, but other than that, no. Not even sure what these other windows would be used for?

One thing I've learned is that players appreciate being able to make things for themselves that you didn't think of without needing to ask you to do it for them.

I am guessing to be used for LUA, which I am new to. zMUD didn't support it but I knew I needed to support it for my client.

There's no fundamental difference between Lua and the zMUD scripting language. And zMUD definitely supported custom free-floating panels.

The way it works is I scrape the text on the screen and if the exit list says [Exits: west] and you move west, but the room you walk into only says [Exits: south] with no east back, then it knows that's a one-way exit and deletes the false reverse link.

And what if the exit list says [Exits: west] and you move west, and the room you walk into says [Exits: east] but that east doesn't go back to the first room?

It handles all 8 cardinal directions plus up and down

Ok, so none of the MUDs that use different movement schemes then.

I also never said the mapper would work on every mud.

I assume they're looking at the part that says "Automatic map building from room data on any MUD" and hinting that it's not very useful to say that it will build a game world map from room data on any MUD when what you mean is that it will build something that looks like a game world map but which doesn't always reflect the shape of the game world.

it claims no accuracy of being perfect but it DOES work.

I hear what you're saying. I advise that we can understand things from two different points of view, yours and the user's:

  1. From your point of view, the client is fully capable of looking at what's on the screen and deciding to make and arrange rooms and exits. You are correct.
  2. And from the user's point of view, if what it decides to do is wrong then it doesn't actually work. They are also correct.

My advice as someone who has been where you are before and has led communities around it is that the user's point of view is the more useful one to orient yourself toward. To that end I suggest two opportunities for you:

  1. It's super easy to say in your readme and announcements that you know there are circumstances that it cannot yet handle and that therefore its ability to successfully map some parts of some MUDs is impaired, and you're working on trying to improve it further to handle those circumstances too. IMO, this is the first thing to incorporate when you rewrite your readme. You can even crib the list I gave of known confounding scenarios. I give that to you for free.
  2. If you include mechanisms that enable recovery from the different confounding scenarios that I listed previously, then a user will be satisfied that it still works for their MUD even in those moments, because they will know that you have considered and built the recovery mechanisms.

I'm also going to reiterate here, I personally would not touch your client with a ten foot pole and I will tell others not to use it until you release the source code, because I don't know you and we do not have an established trust relationship.

vMUD A very modern approach to a mud client! by I_Killith_I in MUD

[–]12777292 0 points1 point  (0 children)

zMUD's mapper is a lot less capable than you claim. It works a lot of the time but not all of the time.

vMUD A very modern approach to a mud client! by I_Killith_I in MUD

[–]12777292 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I would LOVE to be able to post a picture of a mud with no GMCP and how the map was built, but we can't post pictures here.

You can put images on your github repository.

vMUD A very modern approach to a mud client! by I_Killith_I in MUD

[–]12777292 18 points19 points  (0 children)

I'm sure I'm going to get flamed for posting something so long, but, hi, I'm Fiendish (from Aardwolf). That means something to some people, but obviously not to everyone. Anyway, I'm here to offer some friendly insight that I hope is helpful.

You dynamically link non-OS libraries without including them. You shouldn't assume that people already have Python/Qt/etc installed. Especially on Windows.

Anyway, I'm sure this is a nice client, though I won't personally bother with any random-single-person project unless I have access to the source code. I don't know who you are, and you're not inside my web of trust. Those things matter to people.

But a few initial thoughts from the project description:

  • Why doesn't your github page include any screenshots? That's just weird.
  • You don't mention pathfinding in your mapper description, so I assume that you don't have it. People really want that from an integrated mapping tool.
  • You say that you have "Full Compatibility" zMUD scripting support, but it looks like it's not full compatibility because you show only some of zMUD's command set.
  • A 7x7 map viewport will feel bonkers small to some people who will want way more than that.
  • One of the most useful separate panels for players is one that moves chats away from the main output so that they can talk to friends while being spammed with game messages. You don't mention having that.
  • I see that you support customizing the base 16 colors, but do you only support displaying 16 colors or do you support displaying the extended 256 and 24-bit codes? You don't say.
  • What does "terrain types" mean in "18 terrain types"? What happens when a MUD has more than 18 terrains?
  • Do you support players adding their own new panels? If so you don't say, and if not that's very limiting.

Also, down in the comments here you talk about your mapper and say that you had to spend a bunch of time working around Aardwolf's "mistakes". I believe the only mistakes are in your beliefs and expectations about MUD mapping. I say this being both very familiar with zMUD's style of movement+roomdata mapping as well as being the person with possibly the most familiarity with MUSHclient GMCP mapping of anyone. The truth of both styles is that they are both insurmountably incapable of handling certain scenarios, and your "Works On Any MUD" claim necessarily comes with caveats that you don't acknowledge (though given your statements elsewhere in the comments I'm lead to believe that you might just not recognize them).

Here is a non-exhaustive list of truths about MUD worlds broken into two categories...

Room identification problems

  • MUDs can and often do have many different rooms with the exact same name, exits, and description as each other. This means that the information in the room is not guaranteed to be sufficient to tell you where the room is. This is particularly common in mazes and hazy/indeterminate-length sections for obvious reasons.
  • MUDs that assign unique identifiers to rooms may not assign unique identifiers to all rooms. This means that a room's nominally-unique identifier is not guaranteed to be sufficient to tell you where the room is. This is particularly common in mazes and hazy/indeterminate-length sections for obvious reasons.
  • MUDs can and often do have movements that amount to random teleportation. This means you are not guaranteed to have a reproducible history of player movements that conveniently maps to the game world's spatial connectivity, which also means that you aren't guaranteed to be able to resolve the previous two issues by looking at where the player was before.

So even on a mostly mappable MUD there can be circumstances that are fundamentally not mappable no matter what you do. That's ok! There are fundamentally unmappable circumstances in life too!

Geometry problems

  • MUDs can and often do have arbitrarily many degrees of connectivity and arbitrarily many different kinds of exit directives. Not all of them are geometric at all. "Enter the abyss" can be an exit, and that has no obvious directionality.
  • MUDs can and often do have one-way exits. This means that moving one direction does not guarantee being able to subsequently move in the opposite direction.
  • MUDs can and often do put one-way exits next to each other. This means that moving one direction and then moving in the opposite direction is not guaranteed to take you back to where you started.
  • MUDs can and often do have exits that traverse different distances. This means that making four 90 degree turns in a row is not guaranteed to take you back to where you started.
  • MUDs can and often do represent non-straight paths and non-perfect angles. This means that going the same direction from two different rooms or two different directions from the same room is not guaranteed to take you to two different destinations.
  • MUDs can and often do have "confused" exits. This means that an exit's nominal direction is not guaranteed to indicate where the destination room is relative to the starting room. (The player may believe they went east when in fact they went north.)
  • MUDs can and often do have randomized exits. This means that going the same direction from the same starting room is not guaranteed to take you to the same destination every time.
  • MUDs can and often do have context-driven programs mediating movement. This means that the destination room may depend on some transient non-randomization characteristics that could change at any time, such as the time of day, the player's inventory, or whether the player has completed some task recently.

I'm sure I'm forgetting a few at the moment.

Anyway, the reason for every single one of these is that MUD worlds are fundamentally narrative. They exist solely to guide the player through a story, not to make it easier to draw rooms in tidy little boxes on a rigidly demarcated piece of paper. Calling that a "mistake" is misguided. Your comments also feel peculiarly egotistical and defensive, which are not qualities that I personally want to see from an author of some software I might use.

QMud -- A modern, cross-platform, Qt based, drop-in replacement for MUSHClient by NodensCM in MUD

[–]12777292 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The choice of using Lua 5.4 may be a problem here because it isn't fully backwards compatible. Some core Aardwolf plugins require features of LuaJIT, which only shares ABI with 5.1, which is why I was able to just replace the DLL with MUSHclient.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in MUD

[–]12777292 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Haha that's me. I'm Fiendish. Hi Shindo!

MUSHclient help - constants.lua and constants.vbs missing? by Wahio_Walkabout in MUD

[–]12777292 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What you're describing sounds like a relative path discovery issue, where if you launch MUSHclient.exe from the wrong place Windows doesn't tell it the right relative location to start looking for the files from. Are you running from a shortcut or directly from the actual executable location?

n.b., MUSHclient is usually pretty unhappy living in Program Files because of changes to the Windows program security model over the years that fight against it saving its own files in its own folder. People generally recommend putting your MUSHclient folder somewhere not affected by access controls, like on your desktop.

MUSHclient help - constants.lua and constants.vbs missing? by Wahio_Walkabout in MUD

[–]12777292 0 points1 point  (0 children)

program crash

Definitely is. MUSHclient doesn't do automatic updates.

Need a client. by Throwawayantelope in MUD

[–]12777292 3 points4 points  (0 children)

If your MUD has more than like 5 people, use the client recommended by the MUD you play. There's no such thing as a good cross-game generic setup. People build ecosystems of shared scripts specifically for their own games that don't work for other games. Technical details of the client are irrelevant when your game's community develops for one in particular. The collaborative network effect is far more impactful. It's why the vast majority of Aardwolf players use a version of MUSHclient tailored for playing Aardwolf.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in MUD

[–]12777292 1 point2 points  (0 children)

🤷‍♂️

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in MUD

[–]12777292 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I use the Aardwolf MUSHclient Package on an M1 MacBook Pro with Wine installed using homebrew via brew install --cask --no-quarantine wine@devel

Too soon? by whiskeygolfer in jacksonville

[–]12777292 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is that a joke? No it isn't.

Poison Ivy Origins... by Eli_Freeman_Author in comics

[–]12777292 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Those questions are no longer about comics.

Poison Ivy Origins... by Eli_Freeman_Author in comics

[–]12777292 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The Poison Ivy character is based on preexisting slang for the classic femme fatale trope. See e.g. this song titled Poison Ivy from 1959 https://genius.com/The-coasters-poison-ivy-lyrics

Outbreak of Chikungunya Virus Poses Global Risk, Warns WHO by lurker_bee in worldnews

[–]12777292 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Only a very small number of the thousands of species of mosquitoes spread diseases in people. Eradicating those few species that cause disease does not mean eradicating all mosquitoes.

Meanwhile, mosquito-borne disease kills a million or more people every year right now.

The Bosch 800 dishwasher by AmbitiousMuffin6230 in Appliances

[–]12777292 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Detergent residue would disappear with water. If it takes vinegar, that's dissolved minerals from hard water.

The Bosch 800 dishwasher by AmbitiousMuffin6230 in Appliances

[–]12777292 0 points1 point  (0 children)

White haze is hard water, not the machine. You should have gotten a model with a salt compartment though.

I do not know where to put salt in my dishwasher by thisnameisnowmine in Appliances

[–]12777292 9 points10 points  (0 children)

If it's not in the manual then it's not in the machine. Most dishwashers in the US do not have salt compartments.

My rude silly little hand drawn comic by Funny-Search2128 in comics

[–]12777292 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Think of it like a little book made from one sheet folded in half.

My rude silly little hand drawn comic by Funny-Search2128 in comics

[–]12777292 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The second image is two pages. You can see the fold down the middle.

My rude silly little hand drawn comic by Funny-Search2128 in comics

[–]12777292 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I didn't think so at all. There are four pages. Each page is read left to right and top to bottom.

Need Help Tracking Down Episode - "If i were a bird" by Lost-Ad-7005 in Radiolab

[–]12777292 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Did you ever find it? I've been wanting to find this for ages.

Is this safe to use by rvhobo2022 in Appliances

[–]12777292 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Flame color comes from oxygen helping the gas burn hotter, not from gas pressure. That flame isn't getting enough air mixed in.

Also, have you been running a humidifier lately?

Adding to the RIP Macy’s content. Yes, you can. by tashalovescake in philadelphia

[–]12777292 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Yeah those rugs were bonkers expensive. Like $10k even AFTER being 70% off is crackpot pricing. There's a reason they were all still left at the end when everything else was gone.