Anybody interested in a competition?

"IC"-ly, this is a competition to create an object that wins more often at Rock-Paper-Scissors than the other objects.

Realistically: This is all about how well you can cheat, in different ways.

There will be different categories, each with different structure (to allow/prevent different kinds of cheating). The basic setup is this:

1.8.3p9 has been released right on the tail of p8, to fix a number of issues found once that got into wider distribution (3 or 4 different test OSes just isn't enough, I guess...).

Find it at the usual spot, http://ftp.pennmush.org/Source/.

PennMUSH 1.8.3p8 has been released. Get it at http://ftp.pennmush.org/Source/.

Lots of bugfixes and minor additions. All users are highly encouraged to upgrade.

Click here to download this episode:
Click here to subscribe to the podcast:
Tinytalk is a podcast about MUSHes and other text-based virtual worlds, and the players who play them. In this episode:

• [00:35] Mal@Serenity calls in about Tinytalk 022
• [01:46] Review of Things we think about games
• [05:33] Review of Play unsafe

This is not a post about bringing graphics to MUSHes in the way of 3D virtual worlds or MMOs... but rather how graphics are used to supplement MUSH resources, in particular on webpages.

Obviously text is the primary mode of communication on MU*... it allows our imaginations to run wild and create an individual representation of what we've read. In a very real sense each player has a completely different world in their mind while experiencing the same MUSH. However, humans are very visual creatures and we love visual representations of the things in our imaginations. I would say the vast majority of us have at least attempted to capture the images in our heads on paper. Unfortunately, artistic ability is not always something that comes naturally to many of us.

So... I am curious, how many of those who frequent c.p.o have found themselves wishing they had a resource for acquiring good looking graphical resources for their game or character websites? (read on)

Data handling is one of the most awkward things in MUSH. You want your data to be compact, so you want to try to avoid splattering it across a zillion individual attributes. But you also need your data model to be flexible, so that you can add fields to your data structure over time. If you shove the entirety of a data structure into a list, you can often end up with code that's hard to write and debug, because you're constantly trying to find and edit elements embedded within that list.

My belief is that one of the reasons that people find MUSHcode extremely time-consuming to write, as well as hard to maintain, is that their data models, and the way they handle, store, and manipulate data simply isn't very good. Moreover, it is incredibly easy to write obfuscated MUSHcode.

My solution to this is a layer of what I call Data Factory code. What follows is an explanation plus the code for it.

Click here to download this episode:
Click here to subscribe to the podcast:
Tinytalk is a podcast about MUSHes and other text-based virtual worlds, and the players who play them. In this episode:

• [00:00] Bill MacKenty's fourth graders reflect on text-based gaming

I'm trying to get back into the habit of releasing code at least once a year, rather than letting changes accumulate.

So the next version of TinyMUSH is out. TinyMUSH 3.1 patchlevel 6 has a bunch of new features, including a reply-page, multiple inheritance for attributes via a concept called propdirs (property directories), and PennMUSH-style #lambda anonymous functions.

An entry on Raph Koster's blog reminded me of his page of The Laws of Online World Design.

There is some very good and serious wisdom there for people starting new MUSHes. Go read it, and then, if you've got a second, reply here and tell us all which of these Laws you consider most important, striking, or otherwise which one most speaks to you as a musher or mush admin.

I have released a small update to HSpace 4.4.1 to bring it inline with the current distribution of PennMUSH 1.8.3p7.

Changes:
* Fixed the helpfiles that were missing from 4.4.1 (svn)
* Made a couple small changes to code for compatability
* Updated INSTALL_GUIDE.txt to work with PennMUSH 1.8.3p7
* Modified Unman command to work with no arguments. Players can now issue this command alone and the system will check to see if they are on a console, and remove them from it if so. You can still use the old format of unman .