Evennia on Podcast.__init__

So a few weeks back I was contacted by the general Python podcast Podcast.__init__. They had stumbled on Evennia and were intrigued about MUD development still going on - and in Python even! 

As it turned out at least one of the two hosts were an old-school MU* gamer and between the two of them they had plenty of good questions both on multiplayer text games in general and about Evennia technology in particular. 

You can listen to my accent via one of the links below:

 

• Google+: https://plus.google.com/+Podcastinit-the-python-podcast/posts/Vu9dPVjsR9h
• Show Notes: http://pythonpodcast.com/griatch_evennia.html
• Patreon Post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/3448526
• Twitter Announcement: https://twitter.com/Podcast__init__/status/648703365019529216

Podcast.__init__ logo borrowed from their homepage.

A wagon-load of post-summer updates

Summer vacations are over and work resumes in Evennia land! Here's a wagon-load of small updates on what's going on.
 

Ainneve

The Ainneve project, the creation of an official, open-source Evennia demo game, has gotten going. The lead devs of the project are keen to make this a collaborative effort and there is a lot of good discussion and code being written. After some slowdown at the end of summer it's bound to pick up again. 

Ainneve's a rare chance to see a full MUD getting developed from scratch out in the open. The current issue list includes tags for difficulty and allows also newbie Python coders to jump in. Not to mention you have a chance to get valuable feedback on your work by seasoned coders!

So if you are at all interested in making a MUD, try out Python/Evennia or just get involved in a semi-big programming project, this is a great chance to do so.

Imaginary Realities

Since a few weeks, there is a new issue of Imaginary realities (vol 7, issue 3) is out. As usual I have an article in it. This venerable e-zine was revitalized to include articles on both MU* as well as roguelikes, Interactive fiction and others. Not only is this issue the most content-rich since the reboot, with this issue they have also spruced up their interface to make past issues easier to navigate.

• "A text MUD with a working ecology system" - in this article Molly O'Hara  details the concepts behind simulating a functioning ecologic network in a game. Interesting stuff and some parts of this is certainly worth considering for any open-world game design. I wonder at which level of detail the system become more complex than the players can appreciate though.
• "Dispelling the gloom" by Tomasz Gruca is an interesting essay on the author's history growing up in the former Soviet Union and eventually finding text adventure games and interactive fiction, a passion he has apparently lately re-kindled. He makes the observation that the current "retro" trend of games have not really reached back to the text-based game world when it comes to mainstream acceptance.
• "How integral are letters and text to ASCII gaming?"by Mark R. Johnson goes into the practical use of ASCII in traditional rogue-like games (beyond nostalgia). This is a meaty article that goes into both text-as-graphics as well as the use of text for aiding imagination and suggest subtle puzzles in some classic rogue-likes. 
• "Legend and the lore" (Hugo Zombiestalker) proclaims the death of the traditional point-and-click adventure game and but then moves on to try to distill just why those games nevertheless was so appealing to him and how it can be applied in modern game designs like zombie-survival MUD Epitath which he is a senior developer for. Plenty of good observations here!
• "The bonds of mudding" by Clint Itan Kuranes Knapp writes about the community that can spring up on a long-running MUD, the interactions the friends and the relationships that could persist already long before "social media" became a buzz word. A warm text with plenty of anecdotes and examples and things to ponder for both designers and staff when wanting to cater for this type of player bonding. 
• "The mercurial temperament at the end of the world" (Drakkos) discusses NPCs and how they rarely are as interactive as one would want (the term "vend a chat" is a good one I think). He then goes on to how they have implemented their "Mercurial" system for NPCs in Epitath. This seems to be a state-AI system where NPCs have moods that affects what they say based on their circumstance and relation to other actors in the world. Sounds really cool and since he goes into some details on the implementation there is a lot to ponder here. 
• "Where do I begin?" by me, Griatch, discusses one of the more common questions we get in the Evennia chat - 'I want to make a MUD, but how do I begin?' This article starts before Evennia's Game planning wiki page - it discusses assessing your capabilities and resources in the form of programming skills, code bases and motivations to help you figure out what you can realistically accomplish. 

 

Evennia Web client

In the pipeline I have some updates to Evennia's websocket/JSON MUD-web client component. These are changes that are intended to make the webclient easier to customize and hook into Evennia output using only HTML/CSS. More details on this will be forthcoming when I have more solid stuff to show.

______
Image: The troll here a-cometh by Griatch

Announcing the Evennia example-game project "Ainneve"

The Evennia example-game project is underway!

I was quite impressed with the response I got on the mailing list to my call for developing an Evennia example game (see my Need your Help blog post).

The nature of the responses varied, many were from interested people with little to no experience in Evennia or Python whereas others had the experience but not the time to lead it. It was however clear that the interest to work on an "official" Evennia game is quite big.

I'm happy to announce, however, that after only a week we now have a solid lead developer/manager, George Oliver. Helping him on the technical/architecture side is Whitenoise (who, despite a barren github profile, is a professional developer).

George put together a game proposal based on the OpenAdventure rpg, an open-source (CC-SA) ruleset that is also found on github. The example game is to be named "Ainneve" and its development is found in a in a separate repository under the github Evennia organisation.

All the relevant links and future discussion can be found on the mailing list.

George and whitenoise have already made it clear that they aim to not only make Ainneve a good example Evennia game for others to learn from and build on, but to make the development itself a possibility for people of all skill levels to get involved. So get in touch with them if you are at all interested in Python, Evennia and mud development!

So thanks to George and whitenoise for taking this on, looking forward to see where it leads!


image from loveintoblender.

Dreaming big?

Optional Reality's Dreaming Big Challenge has come to an end. This was a challenge about designing a "sales pitch" in 600 words or less for a text-based online roleplaying game. This is the kind of pitch you'd tease knowledgeable investors with -  if investors cared about multiplayer text games and you ended up in an elevator with one, that is.

There were 10 entries to the competition and as the results are now in (including very elaborate judge feedback!), I encourage you to go read all the entries. The focus was on originality and fresh ideas and maybe these short pitches represent a cross-section of the current trends or a whiff of where the wind is blowing for future games. Or maybe it will help inspire you to make a sales pitch of your own.

You can find all the entries linked from the second post of this thread. Enjoy!

Things going on

We are currently in a maintenance and cleanup phase of Evennia, where bugs are found and reported and things are getting more and more stable as people learn and use the new features we merged a few months back.

Overall though I must say the relatively big changes we did to the infrastructure (making Evennia into a full library and making a complete overhaul of the typeclass system behind the scenes) went over with surprising smoothness. There were a flurry of things to fix immediately after the devel-branch merger but no more than expected. For the big changes it really worked very well I think, with no big disaster stories. We have a few bugs lingering in the issue tracker that need to be addressed but nothing show-stopping.

I have been a bit busy with various projects off-MUD so to speak. I was contracted for making the cover and illustration for a book (this is not hobby art for once, but a professional commission which I was quite excited to be asked to do). I also author and draw a fantasy comic as part of another project.

I've not been slacking off on on the MUD side though: I have written and submitted an article for the revived Imaginary Realities e-zine (next issue should be out end of May/early June?) and another article (on Evennia) for the new Optional Realities MUD community website. I also contributed a game-design blurb for the latter's Dreaming Big contest, where you compete (for cash prizes, actually!) by submitting a game sale's pitch under 600 words.

The above mentioned Optional Realities website is so far picking up pace with quite good discussion in its forums (the similarity of name with Imaginary Realities is unfortunate, apparently they were not aware of the former when choosing it).  While targeted at discussions of RPI-style games (a sort of sub-genre of roleplay-enforced MUDs with perma-death), it already hosts several invited articles on game design and general game development that can be interesting for any MU* dev.

People should know by now that I like to support MUD community efforts when possible, and Evennia is thus  listed as an official "affiliate" to Optional Realities (which admittedly means little more than us linking to each other but still). The team behind OR is however also using Evennia for their own "Project Redshift" Sci-fi mud, so we hope to get plenty of good feedback as their project matures.


Image: Truss from Gems NFX

Imaginary realities volume 6, issue 1

I'm a bit late with writing about it, but the latest issue of Imaginary Realities has been out for a month or so now. You can find it here.

Here is a brief summary of the articles in the latest issue. 

• In A Journey Through Paradice, Part II, Matthew Chaplan continues his description of the C++ codebase Paradice9, notably focusing on its input handling, which uses character-mode telnet to produce plenty of interesting effects in a custom terminal client. There are plenty of interesting features (or potential features) discussed. An example is the client knowing to store the receiver of a "reply" command the moment the command is entered rather than waiting for the player the press return (at which point someone else might have written to you and the reply-to target would have changed in a traditional setup). There is no denying the power of having a custom client for your game. And whereas I think some more secure protocol than telnet would maybe be better to use when you control both server and client anyway, it's really interesting to see the power and features you can achieve with it. 
• Building a Giant Mech in Evennia - this is my entry for this issue; a short little tutorial on designing a machine of mirth and mayhem in Evennia. 
• Richard “KaVir” Woolcock's Describing a Virtual World covers the different uses of dynamically created descriptions in text games. He summarizes the types, from the most common, fully static room description up unto the character-dependent procedurally generated descriptions in his own GodWarsII mud. It's a fascinating read since it not only goes into rooms but also how to build piecemeal and situation-aware character and object descriptions as well as procedural help and quest info. The techniques are not for every type of game of course. But a good and informative read for anyone interested in game design.
• Dynamic room descriptions, by Jana, are also covering room descriptions although takes a more conservative conclusion than the full procedural contruction of KaVir's article. This covers the hybrid hand-written description - that is hand-written text that uses a markup language for optional or situation-dependent text. It makes for a good text on implementing such a system (an Evennia equivalent is extended_room.py found in our contrib folder. 
• Saddle Up - A Personal Story about Riding Your Demon to Success is a summary and inspirational story by Michael "Drakkos" Heron. It ties back to his work with Epitath and how it has affected and improved (and continues to improve) his personal and professional life. I like that he manages to include his game development work into his teaching and reasearch, a cool way to make use of your hobby. He has a point on the usability of a coding hobby like this: I myself have had lots of use and even landed project work based on my work with Evennia. One of our users landed his current job based on knowledge he learned working with Evennia. So there is definitely an advantage to mud-development outside the hobby realm.
• The Successful Quest Builder by John "TheDude" Robinette and Joanna "Lorana" Liberty covers the construction of a Quest from the designer's perspective. Rather than focusing on gameplay considerations the authors here focus on the technical aspects; learning the codebase's tools and things to think about debugging and developing something that is enjoyable for the players.
• The article Your MUD Should Have an Account System finally, is Matthew “Chaos” Sheahan's argument as to why a game should use a single login account system rather than the old way of creating a new account per player. Much of the argument is around converting an old-school code base into this configuration and how it's not as hard as one may think. I fully agree on his assessment (although I wonder just how "easy" it is to patch on such a system on an old-running mud). He even mentions Evennia as an example of a modern codebase having this functionality out of the box (yay!).

Deadline for the next issue is announced to be May 31 2014 so don't be shy to contribute your own article. Richard Tew hints at in his introduction, finding people to write articles is the tricky part still.

Moving from Google Code to GitHub

A few weeks back, the Evennia project made the leap from Google Code to GitHub (here). Things have been calming down so it's time to give a summary of how the process went.

Firstly I want to say that I liked Google Code. It did everything expected of it with little hassle. It had a very good Issue system (better than GitHub in my opinion) and it allowed us to use Mercurial instead of Git for version control (I just happen to like Mercurial better than Git, so sue me). Now, GitHub is getting to be something of a standard these days. But whereas our users have occationaly inquired about us making the move, I've been reluctant to do so. 

The problem I did have with Google Code was that I got the increasing feeling that Google didn't care all that much about it. It worked decently, but it was not really going anywhere either. What finally made me change my mind though was an event just after summer last year. There was a bug in Google Code that made the links to online clones disappear. It was worse than that - creating new online clones of the main repo didn't work - people wanting to contribute using a clone just couldn't. 

This is extremely critical functionality for a code-sharing website to have! I made a bug report and many other projects chimed in seeing the same issues. Eventually the links returned and everything worked the way it had. But it took several months before this critical bug was fixed. Even then Google didn't even bother to close my issue. This suggested quite strongly to me that Google Code is not really a priority even for its parent company. It was time to consider a move.

I was never personally a fan of Git. It is undoubtedly powerful, but I always felt its syntax way too archaic and the number of ways to shoot yourself in the foot way too many. But I do like GitHub better than BitBucket (I've used both in other projects), so that's where we nevertheless were heading.

Already last year I created an Evennia "organization" on GitHub and one of our  users first helped to set up a Git Mirror of our Mercurial repo. The idea was a good one - have a mirror on GitHub, allowing the transition to be more gradual. In the end this didn't work out though - there were some issue with the hg-git conversion and the mirror never didn't actually update. When I checked back and it was three months behind we just removed that first ill-fated version. 

In the end I decided to not fiddle about with it, but to move everything over in one go.

 Converting the repository

 

I set aside a new folder on my hard drive and cloned the original mercurial repo into a new sub folder. A good idea is to set up a quick Python virtual environment for easily getting updated dependencies of build scripts. 

I initialized an empty Git repository and used a program called hg-fast-export to convert. As it turned out there were some finer details to consider when doing that:

• The most obvious one was that the conversion initially failed, complaining about the Mercurial original containing "unnamed branches". These came from a contributor who did something to spawn off all sorts of weird branches with little purpose. I should not have merged those into main in the first place, but in those days I didn't know mercurial well enough to be  concerned. In the end I simply used mercurial's MQ extension to remove the unnamed (and unused) branches so the conversion could complete.
• The second issue was that Mercurial is less stringent about its author strings than Git is. Git's author string is "name <email>". Over the years we have gotten contributions from people with all sorts of combinations of names, with or without an email address. So for this we had to supply a mapping file to the converter. It's basically a list of old_author_string = new_author_string and allows for grouping the various used names as needed (some of them were the same person using slightly different author strings). 

Once this was in place, the repo conversion worked fine. It was just a matter of changing the .hgignore file to a .gitignore file and change some code that made use of mercurial to get and display the current revision id.

 Converting the Wiki, part one

Evennia's wiki consitutes our documentation, it's some 80+ pages or so by now. Definitely not something we want to loose. Google Code use a dialect of MediaWiki whereas GitHub's wiki supports a few other formats, like markdown or reST. I needed to convert between them.

Digging around a bit I found googlecode2github. This download contains python scripts for converting the wiki as well as Issues. I didn't really get the issues-converter to work, so I had to find another solution for that (see next section).

All in all, the initial wiki conversion worked decently - all the pages were converted over and were readable. I was even to the point of declaring success when finding the damn thing messed up the links. Googe Code writes links like this: [MyLink Text to see on page]. The script converted this to [[MyLink|Text to see on page]]. Which may look fine except it isn't. GitHub actually wants the syntax in the inverse order: [[Text to see on page|MyLink]].

Furthermore, in Google Code's wiki, code blocks were marked with

{{{ 
  <verbatim code> 
}}}

In markdown, code blocks are created just by indenting the block by four spaces. The converter dutifully did this - but it didn't add empty lines above and below the block, which is another thing markdown requires. The result was that all code ended up mixed into the running text output.

I could have gone back and fixed the converter script, but I suspected there would be enough small things to fix anyway. So in the end I went through 80+ pages of fixing link syntax and adding empty lines by hand. After that I could finally push the first converted wiki version up to the GitHub wiki repository.

Some time later I also found that there is a way to let GitHub wiki pages use syntax highlighting for the language of your choice. The way to do this is to enclose your code blocks like this:


```python

<verbatim code>

```

This is apparently "GitHub-flavoured" markdown. So another stint into all the pages followed, to update everything for prettiness.

 Converting Google Code Issues

I didn't want to loose our Issues from Google Code. I looked around a bit and tested some conversions for this (it helps to be able to create and delete repos on GitHub with abandon when things fail). I eventually settled on google-code-issues-migrator.

This is a Python script that gathers all the Issues from a given Google Code project. It then uses GitHub's API to re-post the issues. It retains the issue numbers and re-maps the Google Code Issue tags to GitHub's equivalent. It didn't retain most other formatting and whereas I ended up as the creator of all issues, the converter included the name of the original author as well as a link back to the original Google Code one. I found that to be quite sufficient for our needs. 

 Converting the IRC announcer

A lot of development discussion goes on in our IRC channel #evennia on Freenode. There is an announcer bot in there that I've written, that collates information from various sources and reports it in the IRC channel:

• Repository updates
• Wiki updates
• Issue creation and updates
• Mailing list/forum posts
• Dev-blog updates (this blog)

Say what you will about Google, but they are great at offering RSS feeds to all their stuff. So my IRC bot was basically a glorified threaded RSS reader that echoed changes to the channel as they came in. This had been working nicely for years.

GitHub does offer RSS feeds to -some- of their offerings, but it's a lot more patchy. I eventually had to do quite a bit of hacking to get everything reporting the way we were used to.

• GitHub has its own IRC announcer bot that reports to IRC. The problem is that this will connect, send message and then disconnect. This causes a lot of spam in the channel. We neither can nor want to set +n on our channel to allow external messages either. The way I solved this was to expand my own custom IRC bot to sit in two irc channels. The GitHub announcer connects to only one of them (so this gets all the spammy connect messages). My IRC bot picks up the announcement and echoes it cleanly to our main #evennia channel.  It works really well.
• Issues are handled by the GitHub announcer in the same way. 
• GitHub has no automatic way to report wiki updates. It doesn't even have a proper RSS feed. However, a user clued me in on using the pipes website to relay an RSS feed from github. I then configured my IRC bot to check that RSS and report it (I also changed the IRC colours to match the GitHub-announcer ones).
• Mailing list and blog haven't changed, so those are still handled via RSS as before.

All this done, the modified IRC announcement works well.

 Closing the book on Google Code

At this point all the critical things were moved over. So after some heads-up warnings on the mailing list (and users helping to rewrite our documentation to use Git instead of mercurial) we eventually made the official move.

One thing I really dislike is when a project switches hosts and don't let users know about it in their revision history. So I made a mercurial-only last commit announcing that the repo is closed and giving the link to the new one.

The Google Code page doesn't go anywhere, but I changed the front page to point to GitHub instead. I even made an issue in the Issue tracker with a title telling people not to use that tracker anymore. Finally I re-pointed all the links on http://www.evennia.com to GitHub and made a mailing list posting. Move was officially complete.

 Converting the Wiki, part 2

At this point were were officially moved over and I started to look into getting fancy with our documentation. We have for the longest time made automated translations of our wiki for compiling by ReadTheDocs.

Getting Google Code's special wikimedia syntax into reST (that ReadTheDocs uses) used to mean jumping through a few hoops. My hackish solution worked in two steps. First a custom python script (whose originating url I can no longer find, sorry) converted the Google Code wiki to HTML. Once this was done, pandoc converted the files from HTML to reST. The result was ... acceptable. There were some minor issues here and there but mostly the result was readable.

I figured that converting from the more standard Markdown of the GitHub wiki to reST should be a breeze by comparison. Not so.

The first hurdle was that the version of pandoc coming with my Linux distribution was too old to support Github-flavoured markdown syntax. I knew from before that Pandoc worked so I didn't want to start with something else. I had to download the several hundred MBs needed by the Haskell build environment and their package manager in order to get and compile all the dependencies and finally the latest version of pandoc. To their credit it was all a very streamlined experience, it just took quite some time.

The second hurdle came when finally looping pandoc to convert all wiki files. It turns out to be that the [[Text on page|address]] syntax I had manually corrected earlier is a special syntax offered by Gollum, the engine powering GitHub's wiki behind the scenes. None of the markdown-to-reSt converters I looked at (pandoc or otherwise) even recognized this syntax as a link at all. As it turns out, normal markdown actually expects its links in the format [Text on page](address).

I was not going to go through and edit all those pages again. So my next step was to write a script to scan and replace all the [[...|...]] syntax in our wiki and replace it with the standard markdown one. After this the markdown files converted to reST quite nicely -- formatting-wise they look much better than the old wiki to HTML to reST chain I had to use from Google Code.

Problem was that when compiling these reST pages into HTML with Sphinx, no links worked.

Each individual page looked okay, just that the links were not pointing to anything reasonable. In retrospect this was not so strange. Pandoc knows nothing about the relationships between files, and clearly the simple naming scheme used for addresses is something the wiki softwares knows and Sphinx does not.

Some thinking lead to a custom Python script for renaming the link targets in the converted pages to their html page name. This needed to handle the fact that wiki links also allows whitespace. So the [Start](Getting Started) link would be converted to [Start](GettingStarted.html), which seems to be the format with which Sphinx will generate its pages.

One also needs to have a "toc" (Table of Contents) to tie all those pages together for the benefit of Sphinx. I just used a "hidden" toc, letting my converter script add this to the bottom of my normal index file. As long as it's included somewhere, Sphinx will be happy.

Originally I put the reST files in a subfolder of the GitHub wiki repo, I thought I could just point ReadTheDocs to that repo later. The GitHub wiki has a strange "feature" though. It seems to pick its wiki pages from wherever they are in the repo, no matter if they are in the root or in subfolders. Suddenly I was starting to see reST-style pages appear in the online wiki, and sometimes I would get the markdown version (the two would go out of sync). Very strange and confusing.

Since the files clearly "polluted" our wiki, I had to move the converted reST files to a separate branch of the wiki repository. This has the advantage of keeping all the support scripts and converter mechanisms separate from the normal wiki content. ReadTheDocs can luckily be set to read its information from another branch than master, so finally the latest converted wiki can again be read there!

That concludes what I think was the last main conversion effort. Phew!

 Impressions so far

GitHub is nice. The merge requests and easy way to comment on them are really good. Since people are more familiar with using GitHub overall, it does seem to be a shorter step for people to make a fork and contribute small things. Doing the same in Google Code was probably not harder per se, just something less people were previously familiar with.

Due to the modular way Evennia is structured, people are recommended to make a fresh clone of the new Git repo and simply copy their plugin source files and database back into it. So far this seems to have gone smoothly.

The GitHub issue tracker is worse than the Google Code one. It has no good way to order Issues or list them in a more compact form (nor in a matrix). Not having good issue templates is really limiting; having to reply to issues only to ask for basic info they should include in their issue is an unnecessary time sink.

I also find that there is no clear way to announce an issue change (like "Needing more information"). Tags work partly for this, but setting them is not announced anywhere as far as I can tell - they are just there.

Most things also takes so much spaaace. Overall GitHub seems designed for people with big monitors. I have those, but most of the time I prefer working on my laptop. I'm sure it's a matter of habit, but Google Code is very compact by comparison. It gave a lot better overview of things. On GitHub I have to scroll everywhere and this is true both in the repo view, wiki and issues.

These small quips nonwithstanding, I think this move will serve us well. There is a good wibe of development and continuing improvement going on at GitHub. There's plenty of help and tutorials all over. Since so many people are using GitHub, problems are more likely to have been answered before. And of course we hope this will in effect help more people find Evennia and join the fun.

Looking forwards and backwards

We are almost a month into the new year, time to look forward.

But first a look backwards. The year of 2013 was a year of big development projects and lots of quiet in the main repository in between. Two major updates were released during the year.

The first update, the "many sessions per player" update, originated in a feature request that I thought would be easy to implement but which led to far-ranging changes (and honestly, improvements) to how Players and Sessions interconnect. It was a lot more more work than I anticipated.

The second update was about moving Evennia's web server from the Portal level into the Server-level. The actual moving of the server was actually considerably easier than I thought it would be. But it turned out that a truckload of other things came along with it. Not only did the cache system have to change in order to accommodate the new webs erver, I had to also finalize the Out-of-band structure, since this made use of the cache system. And while I were at it, other fixes were done and ... the update grew and grew. When it finally merged late last year it closed plenty of issues, but it would probably have been better to structure it into more, small updates instead.

Anyway, 2014 promises continued (and hopefully more continuous and gradual) development of Evennia. The closest upcoming upheaval is our move from Google Code to GitHub in a few days (I'll probably do a blog about that once it's done). Apart from that we are currently in a fixing state, cleaning up and fixing remnant issues from the big mergers.

Another Issue of the MUD e-zine Imaginary Realities is coming too. I just contributed with an Evennia-related article. If anyone reading this blog has anything MUD-related to write about, do consider contributing before January 31, they need more articles! I don't think you need to be too advanced, anything from a mud-development anecdote to retells of good MUD gaming memories might be interesting I would think.

Imaginary Realities is back

The Imaginariy Realities webzine was the place to go to for MUD game design articles in the late 90's. Last released in 2001, its articles are still worth the read for any game designers today. 

But guess what - this venerable ezine has now returned! You can find the new issue here.

I think this is a good community initiative worthy of support. I contibuted two articles myself (one of which is about Evennia) and would like to thank the staff/editors who took their work very seriously and did sterling work on getting everything in shape.

Thanks also to the other authors who penned some very interesting articles. Great job guys!

My impressions: 

• KaVir elaborates in A modern interface for a modern MUD on the advantages of not sticking with an outdated UI just for the sake of it. Adding a more accessible presentation is not that hard and won't ruin your game but rather help it. Whereas I have read his argument about this before, this is a good summary to take to heart. Evennia's javascript web client is currently mainly a telnet clone; there's a lot of things we could offer to make it easier for users to offer a more graphical presentation.
• Molly O’Hara, in her A well built zone is a work of art, outlines a list of useful things to keep in mind when designing a zone. While some of these vary with game type, others do not. I like the suggestion that scripting bugs need not be the most important aspect - syntactic errors can be handled by automated means as long as the design aspect of the zone is solid.
• A journey through Paradice [sic] is Matthew Chaplain's entry on designing a dice-roller using the telnet protocol. Some interesting things here, including making creative use of the telnet character-mode and VT100 control sequences. This ties a bit into KaVir's article, in that the interface used for "modern" MUDs are often voefully missing out on a lot of possibilities.
• Blind accessibility: challenges and opportunities by Matthew “Chaos” Sheahan, is based on interviews with a blind mudder and a game admin having implemented lots of support for seeing-impaired players. This was a really interesting article since I've been pondering myself what could be done from Evennia's core side to help players support players using screen readers. Most seem to be down to configuration options though, and avoiding making colour or ascii art the only sources of information. These are all things Evennia devs implement depend on their game. We may offer some good contribs to build from though.
• Evennia: an introduction - this is mine. It not-so-briefly sums up stuff about Evennia and the more important systems it relies on.
• Getting a roleplaying scene going - another article of mine. This is a light-hearted list of tropes for getting a RP scene going on an RP-mud. It's based on things I've tried or seen myself in play. 
• Darcie “Natilena” Laur laments on the often opaque newbie guides in Introducing new players and redesigning MUD School. It describes how she tested (and improved) her own MUD's starter area while testing it on her kids. It made me think more on having Evennia offering easier ways to dump text logs in all sorts of situations. And we find out that kids have the attention span of zombie squirrels - something new learned every day!
• Finally, The Hunger Game, or how I learned to break the ship from the bottle is Michael “Drakkos” Heron's epic about his journey developing and releasing his zombie-survival MUD Epitaph. Drakkos is a frequent blogger on the MUD-planet feed, so I knew some of this already, but it's a good read and contains some useful warnings and things-to-think-of for those thinking of starting their own MUD project. We already give some of the same advice (albeit with fewer words) in our wiki but I'm seriously considering linking to Drakkos post from there as well - it gives a more comprehensive treatment and offers a real-world example of the long road to a released game.

The issue also contains a call to help recover old MUDing resources that has gone offline since their heyday. Having browsed through the classic MUD-dev mailing list archives I can agree they are not quite as easily searchable as could be hoped. It would also be great to see the old comment posts tied to the articles of the old Imaginary Realities articles, if those could be found somehow.

This is actually one thing which I do miss with this first Imaginary Realities issue - a way for readers to comment on the articles. This would likely mean a much higher level of complexity and work though, so I can certainly see why it's not there - using the existing MUD forums is probably enough for now.

Anyway, I'm happy to see this thing getting off on a good start. I'm already looking forward to the next issue! 

A list of Evennia topics

Some Evennia updates.

Development
Lots of work has been happening in the dev-clone of Evennia over the last few months.
As alluded to in the last blog, the main work has been to move Evennia's webserver component into the Server-half of Evennia for various reasons, the most obvious one to make sure that all database writes happen in the same process, avoiding race conditions. But this move lead to a rework of the cache system, which in turn lead to me having to finalize the plans for how Out-of-Band protocols should be implemented server-side. And once that was finalized, OOB was pretty much implemented anyway. As part of making sure OOB trackers were updated correctly at all times meant reworking some of the ways data is stored ... So one thing led to another making this a bigger update than originally planned.

I plan to make a more detailed post to the mailing list soon with more technical details of the (relatively minor) API changes existing users should expect. The merging of the clone into the main repo is still a little way off, but adventurous users have already started testing things.

Google Code
I like Google Code. It's easy to manage and maintain, it has a good wiki and Issue system, not to mention that it allows the use of Mercurial. But in the beginning of September, suddenly all links to our user's clone repositories were gone from the front of the project page. Not only that, creating new clones just didn't work anymore.
Now any site can have bugs, and we made an issue for it (other projects were similarly affected). But nothing happened for the longest time - at least two months given that we didn't report it right away. Just recently the functionality came back but there is no confirmation or comments from Google (our issue is not even closed).
That such a fundamental feature can go unheeded for so long is disturbing to me, driving home the fact that Google is certainly not putting much priority in their code hosting.

Community
Some furious activity in the IRC chat lately, with new people dropping in to chat and ask about Evennia. For example, an enthusiastic new user learned not only about Evennia but also Python for the first time. It was a lot of fun to see him go from having no programming experience except mush softcode to doing advanced Evennia system implementations in the course of a week and offering good feedback on new features in two. Good show! The freedom you get upgrading from something like softcode to Evennia's use of a full modern programming language was seemingly quite eye-opening.

Other discussions have concerned the policies around using clones/branches for development as well as the benefits of some other hosting solution. Nothing has been decided on this. There is however now also an official GitHub mirror of Evennia's main repo to be found here.

Imaginary Realities
The deadline for entering articles for the Imaginary Realities web zine reboot has passed. It's a good initiative to bring this back - the original (archived) webzine remains a useful mud-creation resource to this day. I entered two articles, one about Evennia and another about general mud-roleplaying. It will be fun to see how it comes out, apparently the first issue will appear Nov 13. 

Community interest

It's fun to see a growing level of activity in the Evennia community. The last few months have seen an increase in the number of people showing up in our IRC channel and mailing list. With this has come a slew of interesting ideas, projects and MUD-related discussion (as well as a few inevitable excursions into interesting but very non-mud-related territory - sorry to those reading our chat logs).

One sign of more people starting to actually use Evennia "for real" is how the number of bugs/feature requests have been increasing. These are sometimes issues related to new things being implemented but also features that have been there for some time and which people are now wanting to use in new and creative ways - or systems which noone has yet really used "seriously" before. This is very encouraging, especially since a lot of good alternative solutions, variations and edge cases can be ironed out this way. So keep submitting those Issues, people!


The budding Evennia community consists of people with a wide variety of interests, skillset and ambition.

There are quite a few people who sees Evennia as a great stepping stone for learning Python, or for getting experience with creating a bigger programming project in general. Some are skilled programmers in other languages but we also have a few with only limited prior coding experience. From the experience in chat, it's really quite striking how fast members pick up the ropes. I'd like to think our documentation is at least partially helping here, but of course it helps that Python is inherently very easy a language to learn and use in the first place.
Not all are participating with the goal of building a specific game. The general flow of patches and clone repository merges have also picked up. We have some users which are primarily interested in a coding challenge, to help with fixing bugs and features, or which uses Evennia as a starting point for exploring various web- and technical solutions that may or may not be a part of Evennia in the future.


The proposed Evennia game projects are just as varied as its users - and none are yet open to the public. As is common with these things, it's of course hard to determine who actually has the time and discipline to bring their plans to fruition. But I should really start to keep some sort of record of who works on what, I'm terrible with remembering this stuff ... so below is just some sort of summary of my impressions, not a comprehensive listing.

As can be expected, most proposed Evennia projects concern relatively standard MUD-style games. A few people are into building traditional hack-and-slash variety games, but most want to expand on the concept considerably. There was even one user exploring using Evennia for a RobotWars kind of experience (where you "program" robot programs in a custom language and battle them). Another project (Avaloria, also blogging on the MUD-dev rss feed) aims for a sort of base-building/strategy mechanic combined with more traditional MUD elements. There are at least two zombie-survival concepts floating around and a few large-scale procedural-content-driven science-fiction text games. One user has apparently a working Smaug->Evennia importer.

It seems that most Evennia users want to offer some sort of roleplaying environment, or at least a "roleplay-friendly" one. Currently we have at least two MUCK admins who aim to convert their existing, running games to Evennia. Whereas the initial idea was to implement parsers for MUCK's MUF language, it seems the conclusion has now shifted to it being faster and easier to just rewrite the MUF-coded functionality in Python (and maybe use something like Evlang for player scripting instead). Several people have announced their interest in creating "RPI"-style games (Armageddon seems to be a big inspiration here), but there was also a MOO admin and even a writer of Interactive Fiction who dropped into the mailing list to see if Evennia could be used for their style of game.

How many of these projects actually reach a point of maturity remains to be seen. But that people are wanting to use the system and is really putting it through its paces is encouraging and very helpful for general Evennia development.