User talk:Kevan

Bulletin Board

Hey kevan, me again. The bulletin board in MUSH is totally overloaded could you a) fix this or b) tell us how to fix it? Thanks Gimanator

I don't know anything about a bulletin board. Is this an object you've added yourself? --Kevan 11:56, 12 June 2008 (BST)

A brief of the board tells me that it's property of CashCrazed and therefore, it's his territory. Or I could clone my bulletin board and stick it in the Lobby, but mine's a bit more complicated than CashCrazed's.--Atticus 15:15, 12 June 2008 (BST)

Actually, it's been there for a while. Your bulletin would be fine, atticus, but how does it work? Gimanator 22:54, 12 June 2008 (BST)

bhelp to get commands, bscan to read posts.--Atticus 04:00, 13 June 2008 (BST)

EDIT: Cloned and moved the bulletin board to the lobby.--Atticus 04:03, 14 June 2008 (BST)

Troubleshoot?

Hi kevan, I just recently found out about dvorak and wanted to use dvorakMUSH, but whenever I try to create an account it tels me the name is illegal or something else. How can I fix this?--Gimanator 16:28

What's the exact message you're getting? And what are you typing to create an account? --Kevan 23:41, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

It tells me 'Either there is already a player with that name, or that name is illegal.' every time. I type in, create<gimanator><*password*>--gimanator 16:34 march 5, 2008

Are you putting <>s around the name? The proper command, if your name is 'name' and your password is 'password', would be:

create name password

-- Zaratustra 08:07, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

yee-ha! it worked! thank you. --gimanator 7:39 march 7, 2008

Deck transfer

HI Kevan,

hope I dont speed up too much pasting those decks here! ;) Anyway, I am stopping for now as I need also to sleep :D

C ya!

Joe

Navigation bar

Kevan,

is it possible to expand the "navigation" bar on the left? I mean to put there direct links at least for Decks and Rules?

J.

Good idea. It's done. --Kevan 23:59, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Thx, appreciated ;)

Added that little comments to the "About the Dvorak Game Wiki" link on the bottom.

I see you are starting to make the Slovak subsection. Looking forward to it!

J.

Favourite decks

Kevan, what are your favourite decks - if you remember? --Joeyeti 15:37, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't really remember; it's been a while. Did laugh at things I'd forgotten when transferring the decks across, though - maybe a "favourite decks" section would be a good thing for user pages, when I get around to thinking about it properly. --Kevan 18:18, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Card layout

Maybe the cards would be more stable if they were printed as a table. --James 15:21, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't think we need to go down the table route; it should be possible to specify everything in CSS, even if it means a horrible amount of IE/Firefox special cases. It'd be good to keep the raw wiki markup as simple as possible, and arranging cards in tables would complicate that.

I wouldn't put yourself to too much effort sorting out that "longtitle" tag, either - once the CSS is sorted out, card titles should be able to expand to fill however much space they need, and "longtitle" will be obsolete. --Kevan 18:31, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Creative outlet

Kevan,

I've been looking for a good creative outlet, and it appears your Dvorak system is perfect. I love its simplicity and incredible capacity for innovation and creativity. I'll be sure to post my decks to share with others. How long have you been playing games? And is it true that being British automatically makes you awesome? Arcthearcane 21:30, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks; I've been pleased by how strongly Dvorak can be a creative small-universe simulation and metaphor-building exercise. Good luck with any decks you work on.

I've been playing games forever. And being British makes you automatically brilliant, not awesome. --Kevan 23:06, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

---

Um, I deleted that because it says the same thing two bullet points above it; but yeah, there is a bug. --Ryan 1729 10:07, 2 April 2007 (BST)

Sorry...

I crashed the engine on the mush thingy. I didn't understand what I was doing but I promise not to make the same mistake again. Sorry. P.S. It needs to be fixed now.

Just a Quick Question

I started a deck, but then I realized that it would make a better CCG. How can I do this? Give me a message. --Corrigan

Dvorak on Magic Set Editor

Kevan,

Hello. I would estimate about six months ago, I became a template developer for Magic Set Editor. Recently, I went searching for templates and template creators who have not surfaced as part of the MSE 2 community. While doing so, I found the Dvorak template. Sadly, it is only for version 0.2.7. MSE is now on version 0.3.5, and any template from 0.2.7 has since been rendered non-functional. I would like to volunteer to update this template to 0.3.5 and make it available to the general MSE community, but to do that, I need to speak with the creator of the template.

I noticed that you added the link to the template to the wiki page. Do you know who the creator of the template is? Any information you can give would be much appreciated.

-Pichoro

Infinite Deck

I think we're due for another split. Is that something any user can do? --Gill smoke 19:05, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Absolutely - just create a new page and move the cards to it. --Kevan 12:25, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

I think we need to split up and or edit the talk page. Maybe we can put a mini FAQ at the top distilling the information at the top and bottom and move the ===Cards by "User"=== sections to the hundred they belong to?—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Gill smoke (talk • contribs) 12:42, 3 October 2008.

It'd certainly be good to do something, although I'm not sure what'd be best. Moving comments to the hundred-archive subpages seems like a tedious amount of detailed work, when most comments are just "this is broken" / "oh, right, sorry". A flat archive of all old comments (Talk:Infinite Dvorak Deck/Archive?) would do just as well. --Kevan 11:24, 4 October 2008 (BST)

DvorakMUSH server

I can't connect to it. It appears to be down. --Pongo 11:10, 21 October 2008 (BST)

Restarted. --Kevan 11:35, 21 October 2008 (BST)

Some questions(don't feel you HAVE to answer them)

1. Why did you choose the name Dvorak? Which Dvorak did you name it after?
2. Which deck do you think defines Dvorak?
3. Is there any way to make an invisible card which doesn't appear in the card list but does appear in the deck exports?

Thanks in advance and thanks for creating Dvorak in the first place.--Xahn Borealis 15:26, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

1. It was a bad joke referencing the Bartok card game. The tentative theory that all Nomic card games have to be named after a six-letter European composer whose name ends with "k".
2. I don't think there's a particularly strong canonical deck out there, but something like the Space Pirates deck embodies a good game of Dvorak, for me - a strong theme, a couple of agreed mechanics, and a lot of imaginative card design, all thrown together in half an hour. It's fun to invent the metaphors, and satisfying to watch cards interacting "realistically" during the game, because they're using the same mechanics consistently ("I use the Andromedan Crystals to Bribe your Electric Parrot." "Not so fast! I'm engaging my Escape Pod to stop him from leaving.").
3. I'm not sure what you mean. A card that doesn't appear on the wiki, but appears on the deck export? You could try putting <!-- HTML comments --> around it; I forget how the export scrape works. If it's an important feature, rather than a one-off Infinite Dvorak joke, let me know and I'll take a proper look. --Kevan 16:21, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, that's what I meant. I want a signature card, to be put in all my decks, just to say 'Hello'. Hopefully an exclusive thing, so don't tell anyone. I just want to spook people who will wonder were the card came from. What do I do with that HTML comments thing? That Space Pirates deck sounds pretty cool, that quote of yours sealed the deal, though, you should use that in the description.--Xahn Borealis 22:03, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

Put "<!--" before the card and "-->" after it. This may or may not work.

Space Pirates isn't a great deck in itself, but it's a good example of how a few agreed mechanics (that some Things are Treasure, and some are Crew) lets you build better metaphors, and set up some good card interaction. --Kevan 22:53, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

Nope, didn't work.--Xahn Borealis 12:47, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

I also look forward to the Blodek card game.--Xahn Borealis 21:52, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

That sounds like a 52-card-pickup variant. --Kevan 00:25, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Export Scripts

Is there a way to edit those or not? I've made a new MUSH engine and I'd like a do a new "loadcard" script that includes the cards' full types (like "Thing - Person" rather than "T") as well as their colors. --CashCrazed 01:47, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

No problem. It looks like the original Dvorak engine just uses the first letter of whatever it's given, so "loadcard Name/Thing - Subtype/Text" will be fine with both, and I've made a quick change to the export script to use that.

I'm afraid my MUSHcode is too rusty to adjust the original engine to cope with (ie. ignore) a colour field, right now, but if you want to hand me the changes required, I'll make them to the MUSH object and update the export script. --Kevan 00:24, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Uh oh...I'm looking over the old source, and the change you made to the export script will break the old Dvorak Engine. Most of the code doesn't just look at the first letter; it expects a literal "A" or "T". If it doesn't get either of those, the card playing commands will break. You can change it back; I made Dvorax backward compatible with "loadcard" so it expands an A or T to Action or Thing and assigns a default color of red to Action and blue to Thing.

Yep, it's broken, I tried it. All the cards turn into Things and break when you try to play them in certain ways. --CashCrazed 05:23, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

I have a new command for Dvorax in particular. It is "newcard <color>/<name>/<type>/<text>". It works the same except it takes the full type name and an ANSI color code at the start. The color code, though, that might be tricky to generate, and here's why. The color code is one or two characters; I use "h" followed by the color because it makes it brighter and easier to read.

The problem is that there are only eight ANSI colors, and they are:

x - black

r - red

g - green

b - blue

c - cyan

m - magenta

y - yellow

w - white

Converting a hex color code to these might be tricky. But when it's finished, it should look like:

newcard hr/Card 1/Action/Do something
newcard hb/Card 2/Thing/Sits there
newcard hm/Card 3/Goal/Get 10 things and you win

Also, there should a "newgame" command at the end of the list to shuffle the cards, since they get loaded into the draw pile in order.

Another suggestion, for BOTH scripts, is to change every "<br>" into "%r" and "<p>" into "%r%r". This will convert the HTML line breaks into MUSHcode line breaks, so we don't see <br>s in the card description.

Okay, I think I'm done now. --CashCrazed 04:59, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Ah, tut, didn't check the change enough. I've switched it back to the old version for now - I'll add an actual option for Dvorax output when I've got some spare time. (Although if it's stable enough, I'd be happy for the Dvorax Engine to become the new, official MUSH object to play Dvorak on.) --Kevan 10:30, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

It's not that stable, if a short session the other night is anything to go by. Loaded one deck, and it crashed.--Xahn Borealis 11:51, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

The reason it keeps crashing is because the MUSH halts it once too many commands go on the queue (I get a "runaway object error"). Take a look here [1]. The MUSH's default limits are too low to effectively handle an object of this complexity. If you can raise the "player_queue_limit" config directive (1000 should be more than enough) and reboot the MUSH, the problems should be alleviated. (Raising the "function_invocation_limit" would help as well. I think that's the one that limited the deck size of your original engine) --CashCrazed 21:00, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Okay, I've bumped those two config settings up, and all mushcode deck exports now have an option for Dvorax output. (My ANSI colour conversion is pretty basic - if an RGB colour has a higher red than green or blue, it's ANSI red; if it has an equal red and green that's higher than blue, it's ANSI yellow; etc - but should do the job.) --Kevan 12:49, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Sorry! Think I messed up!

I was intending to add a comment to All Your Base Are Belong To Us discussion page, and I managed to over-write the archived comments. Think I clicked on the wrong "edit" link. Very sorry - hope it's easy to roll-back? OjnoTheRed.

Anti-spam countermeasures

If you're looping for anti-spam countermeasures, ask new users if they like kittens. Or do Voight-Kamff test. Spambots HATE turtles.--Xahn Borealis 12:25, 30 June 2009 (BST)

There's been nothing since I installed SimpleAntiSpam; I'm not sure if that's just coincidence, but we'll see. --Kevan 23:37, 5 July 2009 (BST)

Looks like coincidence. I've now updated MediaWiki and brought SpamBlacklist to bear. --Kevan 17:30, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

My recent changes, and other things

Hi, I thought I'd bring a few things to your attention:

• I created the Additional Rules - Physical Challenge set of additional rules for Dvorak. Hopefully they're generic enough that they could be used in a wide variety of games. I'm not attempting to cater to everyone here (as the basic Dvorak rules do), but these seem to be common themes running through a certain type of game. Hopefully that page will mean that people creating these kinds of games will be able to spend less time writing rules and definitions, and more time designing the game.
• I updated the Infobox, so that it has about 5 more new attributes. Ideally, I'd like to make it so that, when someone sets the "completion" option to "abandoned", the game is automatically removed from many of its other categories, but my MediaWiki-fu was not powerful enough yet to bring it off.
• I've updated a bunch of games to use the new Infobox, and when they're all done, I hope to retire the "status" option to it (I've replaced it with 3 other options -- completion, playability, and mechanics)
• I've made a suggestion concerning decks vs. games at Talk:Main Page which I'd be interested in having your feedback on
• I noticed there's an unanswered question (by someone else, but it interests me) at Help:Contents, and thought you might like to answer the question.

Thanks for making Dvorak.

-- Wayland 10:48, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the input, and for helping out with the wiki. Maybe we need a clearer place to discuss this kind of thing, beyond Talk:Main Page.

The new jargon is interesting, but seems a little over-specific. If people pick up on any of it (as they did with the "Action:" keyword), we can maybe promote that to the core rules.

I'm really not convinced about the infobox changes, though. The previous system of decks basically progressing through "unfinished", "untested", "playable" and "star" seemed simple enough, and I don't see that having two separate axes of "finished" and "playable" adds very much - most of the 15 intersections don't make any sense, and if there are any important ones that we're missing, we can just bolt on an extra status keyword (as we did for "unfinishedplayable"). "Language" and "Visual status" both seem a little redundant as they're easy to determine by glancing at the cards.

"Additional ruleset" and "Parent Game" are a good call, though, and useful for the decks that refer to them. But they should really be blanked in the 95% of cases where they don't apply (I assume the level of MediaWiki templating here is enough to achieve that?). Same for "Theme", which is useful, but isn't worth mentioning when it's unspecified. --Kevan 18:03, 20 July 2010 (UTC)

Does Wikipedia use its Community Forum (or whatever) for this kind of thing?

You're right about the new jargon being over-specific -- it's not intended to apply to all games, but there's a certain class of game that these apply to quite well. And there are one or two bits which might be more broadly applicable.

I think the difference between your approach to the infobox and mine is that you see it as a quick way to get a summary of the game at a glance, whereas I see it as a way of putting games into categories. For example, say I were interested in Hebrew games -- this will mean that there will be a category to contain them all. Likewise, say you wanted a game where the cards have pictures -- now there should be a category to list those too. I'm not 100% convinced about merging the finished and playable options into the one thing, though (although I'm more convinced than I was). Thanks for your other comments, though.

-- Wayland 07:03, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Good point about categorising, although I think we can drop them from the infobox and just create the categories, for both language and visual status. --Kevan 17:34, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Here's a thought -- what about a game that is proven as far as playability goes, but unfinished as far as the author's graphical intentions go? Would that make more sense of the intersections between "completion" and "playability"?

-- Wayland 07:10, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

That seems fine as "playable". --Kevan 17:34, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

I've reluctantly gone through and reverted all of your edits here - sorry to undo your work, but I disagree with where you were going with this, and would have appreciated a discussion with other myself and users before making such a fundamental change to the site's structure. Reverting the changes seems like the quickest solution here; by all means revert me back (I'll give you rollback privileges) when the community has agreed on the ideal infobox. --Kevan 18:15, 21 September 2010 (UTC)