I’ve updated the list with the ones you all remembered the names of, haha.

From discussion on another thread, I’m now curious which US states have never had a MU* with them as their primary location. Here’s what I found from a cursory search.

California - Liberation
Colorado - Sheltering Skies, Shadowrin Denver
Louisiana - Black Bayou
New Mexico - Masquerade
Virginia - Keys
Washington - GarouMUSH

@KarmaBum said in Missed Settings:

@Jumpscare The game-owner was Tek with a new handle on. The game went under a few weeks after they were outed for lying to everyone.

• Are you Tek? https://brandmu.day/topic/53/mu-peeves-thread/1490?_=1760278262487
• “I wasn’t lying; I just wasn’t telling the truth.” https://brandmu.day/topic/53/mu-peeves-thread/1512?_=1760278262489

Oh, thank you for finding that! It explains everything.

@InkGolem said in Missed Settings:

@Jennkryst said in Missed Settings:

There was that Legally Distinct Not-Really Zombies game set in Canada where people got infested with worms instead of your usual virus and/or Last of Us Fungus. But it was tricksy.

Tricksy how?

In my experience, the head ST disappeared at a critical time in player retention, and the rest of us had nearly nothing to RP about. If something was going on behind the scenes, I was oblivious to it.

I don’t remember its name, and it seems nobody else knows it either. The game closed in less than 2 months.

I’m out of ideas, then.

@dvoraen said in Re: Dies Irae:

@Jumpscare The db and ndb attributes are AttributeHandler objects, to my recollection, and it’s my understanding that using db in particular will automatically handle the database-serialization and synchronization for you. Which is why I feel like I’m forgetting something if move_to() invocation is what fixed the DI problem in question.

Ah, yes, using db handles the serialization, usually. Lists and Dicts are automatically serialized, as are Object references. Strings and Integers are not. You can also intentionally not serialize things by adding .deserialize() to the end of a db request. That last thing is what was being done on Dies Irae, which has been fixed.

@MisterBoring said in Re: Dies Irae:

@Jumpscare said in Re: Dies Irae:

I wanted to see how so many coders become cynical reactionaries

From my time in IT, I can assure you that coder burnout exists across the entire realm of coding, not just MUs.

Oh, I would never want to code as a profession. That sounds like it would suck all the fun out of it.

I suppose the real reason ties back to the capitalistic feeling of a lack of ownership in one’s work.

@dvoraen said in Re: Dies Irae:

updating the database when you use the attribute handler

Using handlers is a topic that escapes a number of Evennia developers, including myself. My experience was that there wasn’t a clear enough tutorial on handlers back when I made Silent Heaven.

@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

Having Jumpscare dress me down is making a lot of this clear as to why things didn’t work!

I wouldn’t take it as a dressing down. She’s just a very tired teacher reaching for her third bottle of whiskey with one hand, pinching the bridge of her nose with the other, and staring at an assignment from that one child…

I’ve been there.

I disagree with that characterization. I’m fairly new, myself. Silent Heaven is my first coding project ever. It was supposed to be a short project during the 2020 quarantine that I’d throw away once I inevitably broke it. I wanted to see how so many coders become cynical reactionaries who despise the players, so I could have a better respect for the stuff they have to go through.

In the 5 years since then, I haven’t displayed any contempt for mankind, so I’m thinking it might not be the coding that makes coders that way. So much for that sociological hypothesis.

@dvoraen said in Re: Dies Irae:

@Jumpscare said in Re: Dies Irae:

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

multiple deserialized calls to update self.db.location

I run a horror game, and that line is scarier than anything I’ve ever written.

I kind of need an ELI5 because I think I understand the scream-emoji worthy part, but I am not sure if I completely understand the nuance. Either way, WHY DESERIALIZED? (The all caps part is me going )

When you look at your character sheet, you now have that information in your head. The DM says you lost 3 HP. You update the information in you head and you record it on your character sheet. The information in your head is serialized with the information on your character sheet.

The DM says your character has successfully moved from the LA Streets to the Corner Bakery. You update that information in your head but you don’t update it on your character sheet. You tell the DM that you want to say hello to the baker. The DM looks at your sheet and says that there’s no baker on the LA Streets. The information in your head is deserialized with the information on your character sheet.

The weirdest thing about this is that Evennia has a built-in method on objects called move_to(). It handles moving an object to another room. If you wanted to do more with movement, you could just extend that method.

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

multiple deserialized calls to update self.db.location

I run a horror game, and that line is scarier than anything I’ve ever written.

@MisterBoring said in Character Death:

your PC sacrifice ties off an 18 month plot and removes one of the biggest antagonists in the game permanently

Someone did that in Silent Heaven. The character was absolutely outmatched, but their sacrifice gave the other PCs just enough time to recover and defeat the big bad.

After the event, I created the “Blaze of Glory” role in Discord just for them. It’s a special tag that has no effect, but it carries a lot of meaning.

@MisterBoring said in Factions:

@Jumpscare said in Factions:

There have been players who have agreed to fights but say they “won’t fight back.”

I’m curious if they only did this when they knew they were involved in a punitive conflict, like the one you described. If they’re fully up for it when they’re “in the right”, then it’s totally anti-fun.

If the character is trying to portray a complete pacifist who holds to that even when they are in the direct path of harm, then it’s a whole different thing that isn’t anti-fun if recognized early and embraced.

The character was part of a combat faction. When a fellow faction member called for help fighting off a monster, the character avoided the fight. So the NPC leader felt it necessary to test the character’s combat capabilities. If he lost, that could prompt the leader to tell him to get stronger. If he won, then the leader could relent and accept him. Either way, I wasn’t going to boot the character from the faction. It was less of a punitive fight and more of a restorative fight.

Sometimes an IC challenge can be a practical way of asking the player if they’re actually having fun in the role they’ve chosen.

In Silent Heaven, characters can’t die (for spoilery reasons). There are many ways to have a contest, but one of the fastest ways to defuse a situation is with a little violence. There aren’t many downsides to engaging in combat, although the downsides scale slightly higher for more experienced characters that have a greater chance of winning (longer recovery times, and so on). I often encourage players with combat-capable characters to resolve things by fighting out their differences and calling it a day. It really does reduce tensions to have a climactic beat in the story.

Conflicts aren’t supposed to fester passively. In the game’s policies, it’s a social contract of all players to ensure feuds are resolved in a timely manner that’s agreeable to all parties involved.

Additionally, there are factions for players who are into combat, and they can effectively throw hands whenever they please, for the fun of it.

It works, for the most part. The biggest flaw is one I never expected. There have been players who have agreed to fights but say they “won’t fight back.” This completely sucks the fun out of any conflict. You need to nip those anti-fun practices before they spread. Once, in a medium-combat faction, I had the boss NPC of the faction desire a spar with one of the PCs as a way of making up for the PC’s transgression against the faction. The idea being that they fight and all is made right in the end, regardless of who wins the fight. The PC decided to be a pacifist, passed all his combat turns, and said things like, “This won’t solve anything.” (It literally would have solved everything.)

That kind of play makes victories feel hollow, and losses inconsequential. It almost feels like metagaming.

In order for conflict resolution between players to be amicable through contests (strength, art, cooking, and so on), I feel like players have to agree to do a few things:

1. Use the tools available to have such contests.
2. Actually try to win.
3. Make the reward for winning and the penalty for losing feel small. (This one is largely enforced by the theme and occasionally STs.)

There are probably more things I’m forgetting. But it does feel pretty similar to playing a board game with friends.

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

what was occurring was that it was moving the character object to the location, which left the account “object” (or meta object?) in the previous location

I can answer this!

First, a quick overview.

Accounts aren’t objects. They’re just Django accounts that have permissions on objects. Typically, the account is linked to a character object when it’s created. When you log in with your account, Evennia allows you to “puppet” objects to run commands as them. I could code it so you could puppet a table object and then you could roleplay as the table, provided the table item has RP commands attached to it.

That being said, when an object is accessed (either by being puppeted, or being seen in a room, or by being a room itself), the object is grabbed from the database and stored into memory. Because of this, you effectively have two copies of the object: the one in working memory, and the one in the database. If I recall correctly, the database is synchronized to the working memory every few minutes. This reduces the number of database writes.

With that being said, there are three ways the bug on Dies Irae could be happening.

1. If there are too many database writes, you’ll get the error “Database is locked.” That means anything that was attempted to be synchronized didn’t get synchronized. This is fine if you make another modification to the object, because then it’ll try to synchronize again. But if you’re just doing things like sending RP messages, your character object will still be in the previous location in memory. This will cause you to receive messages from the original location, but you’ll send message to the current location.

2. If the server doesn’t have enough memory, it’ll happen in reverse, IIRC. It’ll write the new location to the database, and it’ll appear like you’ve moved. But the game didn’t have enough memory to process the move, so it thinks you’re still in the original room. When that happens, you’ll send messages to the original location and receive messages from the current location.

3. Dict attributes (such as {1:“a”} ) are serialized when they’re pulled from the database. If you do my_dict=self.db.special_dict, that means if you make a change to my_dict, it’ll be INSTANTLY reflected in special_dict. So if you make multiple changes to a dict in a single method, you need to .deserialize() the dict as you’re copying it, or else the database will SUFFER trying to update the same attribute over and over again. Chances are favorable that you’ll desynchronize the object and you’ll get one of the two previous bugs.

4. There’s one more way this can happen. But you’d have to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how Evennia works or be reliant on AI code. That’s to somehow deserialize the character object itself. I can’t think of a single reason you’d want to do this. Should you do this, may god have mercy on your server.

If you compare RPing by yourself to an artist doodling in the margins, suddenly it makes sense.

Same. If I have to talk to someone twice about the same misbehavior, they’re gone.

Some people can change. Others can’t. If they need more than one warning, they’re more than likely in the latter category. And it’s a better use of my time to RP with trusted regulars than to try to help a chronic problem player.

If they’re not bothering anyone and they’re not taking up ST resources, let them play.

This is the only AI roleplay I want to see.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1lxqbxa/i_am_actually_terrified/

@Muscle-Car said in Numetal/Retromux:

Lots of points of failure led to it but it was universally avoidable if any one of the balances had worked.

I feel like this sentence describes the world we’re living in.

@dvoraen said in Numetal/Retromux:

I couldn’t think of how to do an inverse to “Hog Pit.”

First you ban someone who replied to a do-not-interact request with “message received.” The rest just happens organically.