Promiseland

[Fetian]

Hmmmm...! I need to look at this more closely when it's not 2 AM, but someone appears to have actually gotten a 'we'll just make our own StoryNexus, with blackjack and hookers!' off the ground. At a glance it looks functional and should allow just porting in what I already have written of SnowRPG, maybe?

So that raises the question of whether I continue trying to adapt it to evennia or if I pivot to this? Presumably pivoting would solve all of the 'I'm not sure how to adapt x mechanic to work in a MUD' issues, but it also presumably would bring back all of the old issues I had with StoryNexus to begin with and put me at the mercy of someone else's coding ecosystem. It'll also (presumably) kill the multiplayer-ness of the project, which would be both a good and bad thing so I guess net neutral on that.

Can't make any decisions on it until I do actually look closer at it. But also the developer is using Black Crown as a demonstration, which (presumably) means there'll be a playable version of that again that isn't being developed by this guy (and hopefully this dev isn't also a asshole).

[Fetian]

Alright, I've taken a look at the thing (ChronicleHub) and to be honest I'm very liking what I'm seeing. It looks pretty easy to use, if a little overwhelming on a skim; it's got several features that really wanted in StoryNexus that those devs refused to include. The dev himself also seems alright -- I took a look through his social media whatevers and didn't see any red flags about his personality or politics, except that he's gone pretty deep into LLM-assisted coding and also he's self-described AuDHD and I'm seeing some indications of jumping from project-to-project. So in the former I do have to worry about this program being LLMed and in the latter I have to worry about it ending up abandoned, but also for the latter he has made the project open-source, so other people could continue developing it if he dropped it, and also also assuming it's in a usable state now it doesn't super matter if he doesn't keep adding features to it, only if he's willing to come back to fix bugs if they pop up.

So it is the LLM thing that is the bigger :\. He does have, as he says, 10 years of experience in programming, so it's not like he's a guy who's just vibecoding the whole thing. He mentioned using LLMs for 'prototyping' but also his more recent reddit history implies using it for more than that in the past couple months (the last update to the ChronicleHub github was two months ago).

To a certain extent, you know, if it works? It would mean I don't have to do any actual programming for it myself, I can go back to just writing the game. There is a lot of temptation in being able to just re-use the -- hold on -- 27k words I've already written for it, for all of that development I've already done to not actually go to waste. There is a lot of temptation in being able to use a streamlined development console and GUI that I'm already pretty familiar with. There's a lot of temptation in being able to basically just pick up where I left off and start working on SnowRPG again today.

Now there are also temptations to going the evennia route. There is certainly something to be said about having more and deeper control over the core of the game, rather than relying on a codebase someone else has made and relying on them for hosting (though in regards to hosting I do think with it being open-source it is possible for me to spin up my own host if necessary). I also will be honest, part of the appeal to going the evennia route is that, in our current internet ecosystem it would be really nice to have what is functionally my own chat server that I have complete control of where I can go talk to my friends (though the potential legal issues involved in that is also a small stressor and a reason to not go that route)

To be honest I also would like to see ChronicleHub succeed and I do feel like SnowRPG is well-written enough and my plans for it are big enough that I could have a measurable effect on it. I want this platform to exist, I want StoryNexus games to be playable again, I want people to be able to make StoryNexus games again, there is huge value in this as an archival effort, which the dev has stated is his primary goal. There's also a lot of benefit to cross-pollinating the audiences between the game hub and SnowRPG

I think it does largely come down to the LLM thing. I don't really want to fruit-of-the-poison-tree this, but it is hard not to, and I know if it gets any more obviously LLM coded that I will be judged for using LLM-generated-content by association. I also of course have concerns about security and maintainability

For what it's worth, I don't know if evennia developers use LLMs to do any of their coding, but frankly I assume that some do. Evennia is a larger project with a lot more people working on it, and they don't have any policy against LLM-assisted-coding that I can find, so it's likely that at least one person on the team does, but it also means there's more eyes on the project if something goes wrong. Should I judge them by a different standard than one guy who is wholly responsible for the code he's pushing? In either case I don't know how much of the programs are LLM-generated, I only know or strongly suspect that some of it is.

I also, to be frank, don't think it's possible to fully avoid LLM-generated code if you're going to be doing anything with computers, currently.

But evennia is more of a framework, and so whatever content I use it for will be my content, and I feel comfortable saying that a SnowRPG made with evennia is LLM-free. Can I say that with ChronicleHub? SnowRPG is LLM-free but the site hosting it is not? The engine running it is not? I dunno.

ChronicleHub looks really nice. It's clear the developer actually cares a lot about it, and isn't just throwing something together to take advantage of people who miss StoryNexus. I would have to do extremely minimal adapting to SnowRPG to make it work in this format, because it's the same format. Any changes I made to it (as far as I know, at a glance) would be improvements made to compromises I had to make when using StoryNexus.

Evennia would give me a lot more room to develop the game as I want it to be, instead of constrained by what the engine is able to do. It would vastly open up multiplayer opportunities. It would require rewriting the game into functionally a completely different game. It would mean learning and getting comfortable with a programming language.

I'm really really not sure.

[Fetian]

There is an argument to be made that if the end result of either path is going to be so different, maybe there's value in just doing both

Of course there are also obvious arguments against that -- time spent working on the one would be time not spent on the other, and it would be insane to split the audience like that, especially when one of the options is a multiplayer game that will rely on an active pool of players to provide the full experience. That said, there is also an argument to be made for just trying both and letting whichever is the more successful (both in terms of player base and in terms of my satisfaction working on it) win out.

To an extent content could be cross-used between the two, but it is becoming more and more clear to me that SnowMUD (Slush?) needs to be a completely different game from the OG SnowRPG, both in terms of presentation but also just in general how I need to conceptualise it and its gameplay. And, well, if they're two different games, then why not make two different games?

[Fetian]

I decided to try a senior food for Oz and got a 3.5 lbs bag from the same company that makes her current food. It arrived today and I gave her a little -- she is so excited to eat it she made herself sick. Fingers crossed she continues to like it because first impression is very promising! I hope it helps!

[Fetian]

That's money I should not have spent this month but man if it does her good I'm glad I did it

[Fetian]

So the property owners stopped paying our water bill again!! And we looked at the timeline of the THREE!! times this has happened and it turns out that each notice we've gotten has been spaced 3-4 months apart since last October and so it sure seems like they pay it once and then just ... don't, until we complain

What the fuck

[Fetian]

Thinking about that 'kids are being taught to read incorrectly' stuff that was going around and how the kids were reading sentences like 'There's a fast [pony] on the farm' and filling in 'horse' when they couldn't read the actual sentence because it's the word they expect to be there, and advocates for the whole-word method were like 'So long as they get the gist of the meaning it's fine'

And I'm like 'how can they know they've got the gist right if they don't know what the sentence says. How can they ever read anything with new information in it if they're filling in gaps with the information they expect to be there'

Anyway I'm also thinking about LLMs and how people keep not thinking it's a problem that LLMs are predictive text generators that fill sentences in with information probability expects to be there

[Fetian]

Sure would be nice if people didn't park right outside my room to blare music at two in the morning

[Fetian]

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[Fetian]

Knee just subluxed so bad it was a hair from fully dislocating and now I'm all wired from the adrenaline spike