2020-10-04 01:47:49

quite success but the complexity overwelm me quickly, and the lp commands too, ah man. I think there is an alternative called xylamr or something, I heard the playerbase is better there, I could look for the info if any of you intrested.

2020-10-04 02:20:15

I haven't been on in a while but it was about dead the last I've looked. The thing is, with no guildmasters and other people to play with, it's not really that funt. It's really a shame because it has some excellent combat mechanics and very intricate and well detailed brewing, book binding and leather working stuff.

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2020-10-04 16:04:13

@27, come back on rn, there are a bunch of players. I've rped with 1 last day and 1 today, and there are a bunch of newbie helpers helping

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2020-10-04 17:46:28

The problem comes into play that when you enter a guild, you will need higher ranked players sometimes, and having none, you can't do much.

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2020-10-04 20:47:51

hmm. The problem is the soundpack is broken. It doesn't play sounds well, gives a bunch of errors and is spammy sometimes.

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2020-10-05 03:48:04

I never cared that much about sound packs other than things I need like event sounds and so forth. But I'm sure it can be fixed. I wonder who made it and I wonder why you have to set a certain value in the game to get it to work though?

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2020-10-06 08:56:12

Hello all. Glad to see others are trying this once more. As for thesoundpack, srik is still around. If there are questions, suggestions, or any ideas, let me know and I will send it his way. Also, as for bad characters we are trying to make it more friendly, so if any off you encounter any issues, try to remember its rp enforced, so sometimes its more of a character than something personal. However, also sometimes talking about things ooc, can help:) Also, you can mail me ingame @frowen.. The soundpack works by typing commands into the mud itself. We also have more players on currently, so this might be a good time to hit up those guilds.
Also, here is a link to our discord server, where you can ask away questions and we probably could answer them more directly and with more details:)
https://discord.com/channels/7120561322 … 2268720181

Why didn't the Romans find algebra difficult?
because x is always 10!

2020-10-07 04:28:40

I'm a little reticent to come on because its a lot of work to get a character to the point of usefulness only to have it die again or something. This game just needs people to function and I'm worried that the same thing that drove me away the first time will do it again. I don't want to needlessly work myself back up..

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2020-10-07 23:40:21

Hello all, many of us, wish for others to stick around. So with a more busy player base now, I would say try it again. I am on often, so just post here or catch me in game and I will help. I sent the one who created the soundpack here, in hopes he could help make it better, as he would care to. Many bash on his soundpack, but in truth, I think it is very generous of him, to even have gone out of his way to make it accessible to us. As he is a sighted player, and it was initially full of visual plugins. So come play with us:), and just to show you all what makes this game great, here is a little combat scene of mine.
hide me among the trees
You start to hide yourself.
sha
You are not hunting anyone.
You hide yourself among the trees.
sneak w
You are looking around for a possibility to sneak west.
sha
You are not hunting anyone.
arh
You swiftly and silently sneak west behind the trees.
It's Evening.
A rocky place covered with some sturdy grass.
Exits: e se s sw w.
A dirty huge ugly male giant.
You will now try to hit the right hand of your opponent.
slam giant
You reveal yourself.
You slam the handle of your composite-bow against the dirty huge ugly male giant's right hand and hurt him critically.
The dirty huge ugly male giant drops his club in pain.
The dirty huge ugly male giant's wounds start to bleed.
You thrust your strong composite-bow at the dirty huge ugly male giant's right leg, but he parries your attack.
You flail around with your camouflage cloak, but you fail to distract the dirty huge ugly male giant.
    The dirty huge ugly male giant swings his right fist at your torso, but your cuirass deflects all damage.
gp
You try to find a good position for this.
You get a spiked giant club. You reveal yourself.
The dirty huge ugly male giant attacks you.
The dirty huge ugly male giant swings his spiked giant club at your torso, but your cuirass deflects all damage.
You thrust your left fist at the dirty huge ugly male giant's left leg, but he parries your attack.
You thrust your strong composite-bow at the dirty huge ugly male giant's right leg and drill it slightly into his right leg.
The dirty huge ugly male giant's wounds start to bleed.
slam giant
You slam the handle of your composite-bow against the dirty huge ugly male giant's abdomen and hurt him critically.
The dirty huge ugly male giant swings his left fist at your neck, but your cuirass deflects all damage.
The dirty huge ugly male giant says in Dark Speech: Zighazi sashador lutz!
k
You ram your knee violently into the dirty huge ugly male giant's right leg and hurt him slightly.
The dirty huge ugly male giant is bleeding heavily!
You focus your chi on your agi.
k
You're not ready yet.
You thrust your left fist at the dirty huge ugly male giant's left leg and bruise his left leg slightly.
You thrust your strong composite-bow at the dirty huge ugly male giant's left leg and drill it slightly into his left leg.
k
You're not ready yet.
You flail around with your camouflage cloak, but you fail to distract the dirty huge ugly male giant.
The dirty huge ugly male giant swings his left fist at your torso, but your cuirass deflects all damage.
The dirty huge ugly male giant says in Dark Speech: Ulg thozk shakut lutz ek smubgnolim!
slam
You slam the handle of your composite-bow against the dirty huge ugly male giant's right hand and hurt him critically.
The dirty huge ugly male giant drops his club in pain.
gp
You try to find a good position for this.
You get a spiked giant club.
wh
You let the hem of your camouflage cloak go.
You wield the composite-bow in your right hand and left hand.
You focus your chi on your agi.
The dirty huge ugly male giant is bleeding heavily!
You thrust your strong composite-bow at the dirty huge ugly male giant's right leg and drill it slightly into his right leg.
The dirty huge ugly male giant swings his right fist at your left arm, but you parry his blow.
k
You ram your knee violently into the dirty huge ugly male giant's right leg and hurt him slightly.
The dirty huge ugly male giant says in Dark Speech: Ulg thozk tharkurr lutz tulunagl!
You focus your chi on your agi.
The dirty huge ugly male giant swings his left fist at your head, but you dodge his attack.
The dirty huge ugly male giant is bleeding awfully!
impale
You balance your composite-bow and thrust it with all your might towards the dirty huge ugly male giant. You impale his right thigh and hurt him critically.
The dirty huge ugly male giant is bleeding awfully!
You focus your chi on your agi.
You feint an attack with your strong composite-bow at the dirty huge ugly male giant's right leg. Alas, your enemy doesn't fall for it, and your strike is lost.
The dirty huge ugly male giant swings his right fist at your torso, but your cuirass deflects all damage.
The dirty huge ugly male giant tries to kick your right arm but you avoid the attack.
The dirty huge ugly male giant swings his left fist at your torso, but your cuirass deflects all damage.
The dirty huge ugly male giant says in Dark Speech: Bursguku bit vishzatuz!
ic
You stop focusing your chi on agi.
You feel your agility fading.
The dirty huge ugly male giant is bleeding heavily!
impale
You're not ready yet.
The dirty huge ugly male giant falls unconscious.
impale
You're not ready yet.
impale
You're not ready yet.
You thrust your strong composite-bow at the dirty huge ugly male giant's right hand and drill it slightly into his right hand.
an
You will now try to hit the neck of your opponent.
impale
You balance your composite-bow and thrust it with all your might towards the dirty huge ugly male giant. You impale his shoulder and hurt him critically.
The dirty huge ugly male giant's wounds stopped bleeding.
The dirty huge ugly male giant died.
You killed the dirty huge ugly male giant.

Why didn't the Romans find algebra difficult?
because x is always 10!

2020-10-08 00:57:38

Seems the grammar has improved. I never knocked them for that as they're German, but it's nice to see that things have improved there.

As to the sound pack, yeah I'm wondering why you have to do something with colors to make it work but whatever, that's a minor concern. I don't think it's fair to bash it; however, if it really isn't working well, then yeah I probably will not use it but I'll try it. Many people don't know how to make a sound pack that well. I've had to unlearn so much stuff because my way of learning is from other people's examples, but when I have improved, understanding where others have gone wrong means that I avoid the same mistakes but at the same time, some packs are just not good.

That said, I am lazy. When I make packs for a MUD, I make them to suit myself and no one else. I include only what I need and it is not within me to make a full-fledged pack with unique ambiances for every area and music for most. I don't do different combat sounds for each gender, etc. Most of what I do is the bare minimum plus some scripts to shortcut some processes if the game allows. I don't make packs that break the rules because I don't want to be the guy who came by everything they have via basically cheating.

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2020-10-08 03:25:30

Oo yeah, I can tell you that without having even successfully creating a character, I will not be using that sound pack. It is really messed up as far as messing with core mushclient functionality. Configuration tweaks I perform on every world I create can't even be done because something this thing is doing is blocking the menus. There are plugins that don't even need to be there, and it is doing weird things with typing and weird things with looping spam over and over again.

Something like a soundpack shouldn't alter the client that much to where you can't even do your own thing with it. The second you do that, I become uninterested. I don't care if it has 7.1 surround sound with sounds for every event in the game, you shouldn't be messing about with the general use of the client just to make a sound pack.

As an example, I always have the option on to allow alt to get to the menus. If I ever distributed a soundpack, it would be in the form of a plugin or plugins you would just drop into your already existing mushclient installation, and if it called on plugins, I would make note of which ones you would have to have or just include them in the archive. This thing came in a weird folder zip folder zip weird circular thing it took me a while to figure out how to unpack.

I think a case could be made that I am pretty particular about MUD clients, so maybe this isn't a complete surprise, but I think at this point, I will be making my own to suit my needs. The only thing is, this pack uses GMCP, which is awesome, but at the same time, I haven't figured out how to do the same and it gets into dealing with some shit I'm not ready to handle code wise, so I'll probably just do the bare basics for myself and everyone else who doesn't have a problem with that pack can go on using it, and I'll use mine.

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2020-10-08 04:48:54

I am glad you tried it, and hopefully you will stick around:) there are a discord and slack server for questions if you need it. Also, srik is super open to suggestions. For ironcross, perhaps you guys could work on a pack together? Perhaps that way he can get an idea of what is useful to a vi player and what is just spammy. just an idea.

Why didn't the Romans find algebra difficult?
because x is always 10!

2020-10-08 06:11:19

How the hell do I get past the creation character section? I can't, because it removes my name it seems, then it says y/n that name is invalled. My name, was going to be oiox, or another name. Every time I enter the name again and try to type yes, it removes it.

2020-10-08 13:59:38

Yeah don't use that pack, it's messing with the input field in a way I don't quite understand.

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2020-10-08 14:52:29

I have multiple alts and all of them are fighters. Getting bored of that rofl.
Still fun game

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2020-10-08 22:59:12

OK, got me a Dwarf character named Benghan. I'm trying to figure out my way around bc I forgot most of the stuff.

BTW, that Discord thingie isn't a real thing. Most discord invites start with discord.gg/ and go from there. On this one, it turns into a thing where there is no channels or content.

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2020-10-09 09:05:51

Hi everyone.

Thought I should drop in over here to introduce myself. I’m the player responsible for making the Geas MUSHclient and the VI soundpack. Thanks Frowen for linking me to these forums.

Looking back over some of the comments here I hope I can give you a helpful explanation of the soundpack, how it came about, and what’s next for it.

How the Soundpack came about:
The Geas MUSHclient and soundpack was and has been my first attempt at coding and writing plugins. Prior to attempting this, I knew nothing about coding whatsoever so work on this project has coincided with me slowly learning and improving my ability to design features and solve problems in lua.

I started working on this solo as a player of the MUD and for my own purposes. I’m not an admin there. The resulting client is not anything developed by the admins of Geas. Just me, a player with a bit of free time a couple of years back.

I also didn’t set out to create something I could release as a downloadable client. That is something that happened along the way as fellow players began to express interest in it. So this is why the package looks the way it does. It is a subset of what I personally use, with all the quirks and experimental design choices included.

Does it work?
It does but people have had a variety of results from it - some have been delighted, others frustrated. Most people I have spoken to tell me it works for them, but they have had to troubleshoot bugs and crashes. I am sorry about those bugs.

Why is it buggy?
A few reasons:
A. my lack of skill coding and refining the plugins to the MUD
B. my lack of free time to contribute to this project
C. the need to revise some early design choices which calls for more of A and B

What could it be in the future?
This was the first attempt. It’s rough. But it could be amazing.

As a game, Geas is perfectly suited to an immersive soundpack. The combat is slow and realistic enough that every swing of your weapon matters and sounds can put your right in the action. I feel like the game world is also greatly enhanced by ambient environmental sounds, and the roleplay amidst sounds like that that is all the more vivid.

Next steps:
I honestly started playing with the soundpack idea thinking there’d be little interest in it from others. The Geas player community back then was quite small. It has grown a lot since then, and I’d like to see it continue to see new roleplayers find us. For that reason, I think there are three things I could do from here:

Idea 1
As I said, I think the way forward with this is to revisit some of those early design choices that are largely responsible for the instability and issues people generally have with it. I have some ideas here, and I think they need discussion with the Geas admins as well as other players first. Knowing my time constraints (as others) this is probably a longer term goal.

Idea 2
Troubleshooting guide - I could write up a set of clearer installation instructions and help files for the current packs. This might go some way to getting people up and going with the soundpack. It’d take a bit of time but I could knock this over without too much issue, if it helps.

Idea 3
Simplified download - I could package up a simplified download of just the necessary plugins and the sound files for the soundpack. This would be a plugin file, not a zip file of the full mushclient. The current packs include a bunch of stuff in addition to the soundpack. Things like an extensive mapper and simplified hp prompts. This would have those features stripped away.

Happy to take some feedback and suggestions from the forums here, or if you've already joined us the MUD has it's own player forums too. As someone else mentioned we have a discord group and a slack group with a bunch of regular players too. Let me know what you think would be the best way forward from here.

2020-10-09 09:17:01

Good to see you made it onto these forums. I hope you can make it an amazing thing and be something both sighted and others from this community can enjoy. Here is the invite link to geas, for those who wish to join the discord, hope this one works
.
https://discord.gg/VHrxtA

Why didn't the Romans find algebra difficult?
because x is always 10!

2020-10-09 13:05:29

@42 I mean, you did pretty well with no coding knowledge getting GMCP to work. Something I haven't quite been able to do. I know that the handler plugin bounces stuff, so you have to catch it in another plugin with an OnPluginBroadcast function, but from there, not quite sure how to handle it. My biggest problem is the superfluous stuff in there and the fact that it blocks the menus. I'm kind of particular about how I set up my client, and an instant turn-off is not being able to do that. Plus, the thing literally overwrites my typing in weird ways.

Thinking of doing my own, but I know that I would probably never release it because I know it's not what others would want since I don't go in with the entire experience from start to finish. Also, most of the things I do relate to scripting in games that allow such things. My pack for another MUD is less of a sound pack and more of an autocrafting batch making pack with some things like energy beeps that raise in pitch the more energy is consumed that tick.

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2020-10-10 01:28:25

Hi Ironcross. Yep, you're exactly right. To explain a few of the limiting design features and potential remedies:

Blocking Alt-key access to menus
I personally use 'Alt + key' as hotkeys. For example, 'Alt + A' to wear a shield. It can be changed in the mushclient global preferences (Ctrl + Alt + G) under the General tab.

Overwriting typing and command line issues
This might be an issue with a global preference in that menu too. These preferences let you toggle on/off things like clearing the command line after sending, or keeping the last command in the command line but highlighted, scrolling through history. A few of these are also changed in your world configuration settings under the Game menu. Like you, and probably like many others, I've got a particular way I like things from years of mudding on different clients. Some of these options, like highlighting your last command or sending command echos, are probably not what you want for a screenreader because as far as I know, highlighting something will tell it to read that out again and remove focus from the MUD output window. In packaging up the VI Geas MUSHclient I tried to pre-configure it for a screenreader but it sounds like I haven't got it quite right - which is a shame because it's a real turn off for new players when they can't get the system to work enough to even be able to ask for help.

If you have a look through the global preferences and world configurations and find anything that is responsible for interface issues like that, please let me know.

Superfluous stuff
There's a bit of this. By far this biggest is something that was picked up on earlier: colours. The Soundpack runs on two main sources of information.

The first is GMCP data. This is where the ambient environmental loops come from. When you're in a beach room, you will be listening to the ocean background track and random beach-sounds dropped in. When you're in the forest, you get a forest track, with random bird sounds and wind through the leaves. GMCP is a relatively new addition to Geas and it could be tweaked to be a little bit more stable. That said, most people don't have too much trouble getting this one working. If you get errors at the login screen, it's probably GMCP. The best fix is to set up the auto-login feature after you've gone through character creation, and re-login to the MUD.

The second basis for the soundpack is colour triggers. When I hear comments saying people can hear the environment but no combat sounds, that tells me GMCP is working but the problem is the colour triggers. Geas is a highly descriptive MUD. Just about everything is described in narrative form to the player. You won't see things like hitpoints or damage points or stats in number form. This is one of my favourite things about the MUD but it also makes it very hard to write extensive triggers to recognise every type of combat event.

There is however a MUD-side configuration that let's you change the colour of certain types of lines. For example, you can make every type of 'you hit your enemy' message to show up in green text. I used this as the basis for the combat sounds in the soundpack. There is one setup command in the plugin (xsetcolour setup), it changes every type of line on the MUD to a unique combination of colours, many of them are very awful like yellow text on magenta background. The plugin then uses triggers to pick up any line in that colour, interpret the line itself, and play the best sound it can find to fit the event. It then reprints the line in a readable colour for the player.

To get to the point of having a highly stable and simple soundpack, we probably need to run it on something more secure than the colour triggers. They're kinda messy and frankly confusing. I have a couple of ideas here, but as mentioned, I'd like to discuss it with the Geas admins and players too. This is one of the reasons why I haven't continued working on it as it currently is. I think I'm better off using the time I have to work on the replacement idea rather than tweaking the edges of the current.

Other bugs and crashes
The troubleshooting solution that has worked best for me and a few others is to either reinstall plugins when they spit out errors, or restart the client. Hopefully we get to a more stable solution soon so that isn't necessary.

2020-10-10 01:57:18

Well if they are using all the GMCP modules, as far as I know, that would completely eliminate the need to ever use colors. By getting it working, I mean in my own projects, since I want to use it in several other MUDs that use it but I'm not really sure how to handle it.

Parsing output is annoying at times though. I have never used colors since I've never found it a reliable way to match. Instead, I will create regular expressions to match on something unique. I also use a plugin that creates virtual buffers for screen reader users that are not visible anywhere on the screen for sighted users. I do this for all of the channels. Most of the time, I will make one long regex to match every channel in the game, then in my script, decide how to handle it based on the one it matched.

But yeah for the case in how you have yours set up, for me to get into it to configure it will require some fuckery. Nothing major, but you'd be surprised how many people don't learn all the features of their screen readers. Though I think that's getting better in time. I would definitely need to re-add the alt keys, undo whatever hell has befallen the input field tongue and then find and fix any conflicts that blocking the alt keys messed up.

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2020-10-10 05:53:04 (edited by Israfel 2020-10-10 05:55:15)

Welcome to give it a shot!

Ah, the reason I'm using colour triggers at all is because GMCP doesn't duplicate the combat lines, and there's nothing in the output to indicate 100% what is and isn't a line of combat (aside from the colour). Having played the game for a while now, there are still monsters I find that have unique and wonderful attacks that won't be picked up by trying to match the text alone.

An example of a regular combat line that has a sound attached is:
"You thrust your sword at the goblin's head, impale his helmet and drill it slightly into his head."

GMCP will report nothing of this event. But the colour trigger will pick it up, evaluate the type of sound, and fire a random matching sound for that.

In this case it is a 'thrust hit' sound. There are a bunch to choose from and it will play a random one in that folder which is nice because it gives a bit of variety to combat. A thrust attack is a common and normal event in combat so it's predictable.

An uncommon attack could be something like:
"The big gnarled giant grabs your arms and tries to rip you in half, but you kick out with your feet and manage to escape."

With colours, this is likely to show up as a 'dodge' event so you could still get a sound to play. But trying to pick it up with text alone is really only possible once you've come across it.

A current GMCP event with a sound is something like your current room sector being "Forest". This will play the background forest loop, and shoot off random foresty sounds at random intervals as well.

You're right about colours being tricky. What I learned (quite late in the picture) is that Mushclient standard colour triggers match the colour on the first character of each line. So if you happen to get a small prompt symbol like '>' at the start of your line, or something else, it won't be picked up.

If all of this info were send through GMCP, that'd be amazing. Next best thing is probably something that can be toggled on in the mud to send special output that we can look at to strip the necessary info and gag it with a simple regex like {SOUND: combat_hit} or something. I am guessing MSP works something like this but I don't really know.

2020-10-10 10:10:17

Yeah that makes sense. Variety is the bane of my existence as someone who designs such things. I kind of figured that NVDA (my screen reader) wasn't giving me accurate color info. I didn't know that it was only matching the first char. It also sounds like they haven't fully implemented GMCP. Here is a spec of a complete GMCP system.

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2020-10-10 21:11:38 (edited by GrannyCheeseWheel 2020-10-10 22:01:21)

Retraction: The autowalk stuff uses the mapping stuff so best not to remove those.

OK, it is possible to remove the plugins about mapping and the fish one as they are not needed. It is also possible to stop the selection thing by turning command echo off in display. These were the biggest irritants. Oh and the chat miniwindow either, we don't need that either as we use the channel_history plugin to handle channels.

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2020-10-10 21:40:47 (edited by GrannyCheeseWheel 2020-10-10 21:45:19)

I'm starting to dig this now that I got things configured. One thing to note is that you could go to lua audio. This would give multiple sound buffers, would make it much easier to manage things, and would allow sounds to continue if the window is switched away from. It is also easier to manage things like adjusting settings in realtime because you can get the buffer it's attached to. It uses BASS and you can have multiple sounds going at once. You wouldn't have to worry about all those do_after_special() calls either, because you could place require "wait" and use a wait.name anon in your scripts which is way more reliable.

Oh something of note, sometimes whatevber prompt you have set up isn't newlining, and you have situations like this

middleleg and hurt it moderately.
where it's cut off when you do certain actions like knee. Not all the time though.

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