Wordpress 1,000% (probably coupled with WooCommerce but there are probably some other options)
I honestly don’t even know off the top of my head why you would use anything else (aside from some vague elitism connected to the large ecosystem of commercial crap which has tainted by association the open source core of it) – it combines FOSS + easy + powerful + popular. You will have to tiptoe around some amount of crapware in order to keep it pure OSS though.
Just finished the first draft of a set of item tokens – I’m sticking with just large round tokens for the vehicles for now, barring something happening that makes me think it’s worth getting fancier with it.
Just finished the first draft of a set of item tokens
Hm, maybe big rectangles for the vehicles? Whenever I did boats I would usually draw them on the map and have them as terrain… I could see tokens for it being really useful as long as they’re big enough to fit everything yes. Maybe 10’ by 15’ for the carriage (two spaces up in front and 2x2 in the back) and boat, and 5’ by 10’ for a simple cart? Rectangular or odd-shaped tokens make everything more complex, but there are a bunch of great use cases for them so maybe it’s worth doing…
Hm, that’s a good thought… like just multicolored bases of some sort, and you can decide what different colors mean however makes it make more sense. I know you can get different colored plastic rings on Etsy and etc that are designed to snap around a mini / token and indicate different things about the creature, also.
I just recently started doing brass bases for some of the player tokens; in my mind they were going to be super popular and it would solve the problem automatically, because the creature tokens would have a totally different construction so it would be immediately apparent, but it seems like people are still into the wooden tokens for whatever reason 🙂.
One other idea which I think I might incorporate at some point is Sly Flourish’s using letters for creatures and incorporating damage with the letter – maybe I’m not explaining it well, but I really liked the idea:
During the game, when a character damages a monster, ask the player to identify an interesting physical characteristic of the monster they hit that starts with the letter of the token. Thus, the ghoul represented by the skull A token becomes the “ghoul with an arrow in her head”. This way you have an in-game narrative that connects the story of the monster with the token. Skull A is a ghoul with an arrow in her head. Skull B is the ghoul with the bones sticking out of his back. Skull C is the ghoul with the caved-in chest, and so on. This is far better than fighting “ghoul A”.
I actually have some vague plans to switch over to using letters for groups of creatures for exactly this reason – this might be an idea that makes it easier to keep track of which creatures are badly damaged also (because the players have a lot more vivid conceptual reference of which one is which in their minds).
Oh, I agree clearly it’s a creature – I’m just talking about how to categorize it in order to give it an art style. It’s useful for a visual hierarchy if the player tokens on the battlefield are heavily distinct from the creature tokens so you can look quickly and say “blue = me, red and orange = other players, tokens with complex graphics = monsters” or something like that.
I think what I’m going to settle on is that the default style is that anything that’s player related (players, horses, healing potions, etc) gets a white background, and anything that’s monster related gets fully colored (either a solid color background or graphics all the way to the edge of the token). And mastiffs are “monster related” even though if you’re hip you’re going to be a halfling riding one. 🙂
Rght, this is really useful, thank you… a little falcon statue as the universal McGuffin token is funny to me, but I feel like that be immersion-breaking i.e. better to have various little object icon tokens and let people pick out their McGuffins individually.
Also, that actually just made me realize – probably the object tokens should be sized consistent with the other tokens, e.g. healing potions and amulets and such should be considered tiny and get ½" tokens, chests and swords on the ground should be considered small and get ¾" tokens, etc.
(Also I’m still wrestling with the eternal question of whether a horse is a player token, a creature token, or an object token (since those categories have different color schemes / art styles to keep the battlefield visually organized). Currently horses are themed as objects, with mastiffs themed as creatures, but that’s always bothered me slightly and I can’t come up with a system for it that makes me happy.)
You’re not going to want to hear this, but this logic (i.e. “But MY side is the RIGHT one, so it’s different”) is exactly why the right wing thinks Trump shouldn’t go to prison and it’s okay when they cheat in elections.
I do agree with you that the left wing is the right side of history. That doesn’t mean someone who’s on the other side suddenly shouldn’t be an executive of anything.
You’re not going to want to hear this, but this logic (i.e. “But MY side is the RIGHT one, so it’s different”) is exactly why the right wing thinks Trump shouldn’t go to prison and it’s okay when they cheat in elections.
I do agree with you that the left wing is the right side of history. That doesn’t mean someone who’s on the other side suddenly shouldn’t be an executive of anything.
Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It’s because he donated $1,000 in support of California’s Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California’s state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
I want to try a thought experiment. Imagine that you observe this comment in reaction to the above:
I just don’t get why the author is so pissed about their political contributions. Guess what, people who are involved in big business are usually right-wing and support right-wing organizations. Shocking. Who could have known. I don’t even want to imagine how the author comes to the conclusion that this is some big conspiracy but I think we all know what political spectrum that guy belongs to.
What I just wrote is a mirror-image version of the top rated comment on that article from a few days ago about the Mozilla foundation funding left-wing organizations. Do you agree with one of those statements and not the other? If so, why?
It is one-sided to say that someone involved in Brave should only be “allowed” to do so if he doesn’t support anything conservative. Just as would be one-sided and wrong to say that Mozilla shouldn’t be “allowed” to support left-wing organizations. Flipping it around, and looking at the reaction when it’s the other way around, is an easy way to analyze your own internal reactions on it.
(Generally, I’m in agreement with the idea that you shouldn’t use Brave because of all these other shady things; just this one part jumped out at me as one thing that’s not like the others.)
You gotta have the concepts the machines are named after change as the nature of the machine changes (and bonus points if the nature of the concept is analogous to the nature of the machine). E.g. if my main machines were planets, then when I added servers they would be named after space hardware (hubble, webb, iss, etc). Raspberry Pis can be ceres, eros, vesta, juno, etc. It actually genuinely helps by distributing around within your brain the placement of which machine corresponds to which concept or which name, and also it frees up more names when you start having tons of machines in different categories.
I’ve had tons of naming schemes over the years (chemical elements and classic video games were two that I used for different banks of machines) and I’ve done that system with good results.
I’m working on a project to host bits of Lemmy on peer cache devices run by the community – if you’re interested to take a look or help test/code, I should have code for some of the caching bits within a few days.
Part 2:
(Continued from the post)
What’s the Next Step?
I started touching on some imagined future steps, but this chunk is already a plenty big and ambitious thing. So, here’s an initial plan for how I want to attack taking first steps and bring myself into contact with the engineering reality (as opposed to the rosy broad picture). Hopefully at the end of this chunk of work, the vision will have adapted somewhat to the reality of what’s useful, what’s possible, what the community’s feedback is, what the issues and problems involved are, etc.
(And, obviously, I want to communicate with the Lemmy devs to make sure these ideas are in line with their vision. I’m laying this all out so extensively partly so that the community has a full explanation of what I’m proposing to do and why.)
So, first steps: I’m making a Lemmy instance that I can use for implementing this. I’m waiting for my hosting to go up so I can make it live, but once it’s up, I’ll start working on it + posting from the testbed about what’s going on. My initial coding task list is:
Set up the peer software with the content-addressable store
Start to have my instance do peer discovery, make the app that runs in people’s browsers from my instance become more AJAX-y and begin to request data from the peers instead of the instance.
Once that part’s working on my instance, I’d aim to be able to move pieces of the actual app onto the peers – construct the bootstrap code, continue the AJAX-ification of the code on my Lemmy instance, and have the bootstrapping app construct the end-user application directly from data from the peers.
Start to tackle the browser app making updates to the data store via requests to the peers, which will involve a lot of work and lot of sorting out replication issues, security and trust issues, and performance issues.
That’s already a fairly large amount to take on. I have further ideas about how the system could move forward from there, but even just that represents (1) an ambitious thing to tackle (2) significant proposed changes to the instance software (3) if it works, a fantastically useful tool that instance operators could use to reduce their instance load if they want to. So, I’m limiting the plan to that much for now until I get some contact with the technical reality and with the community.
What You Can Do
So if you’ve read to the end, maybe you think this is a good idea. Want to help? This is a bunch of work already and I’d love it if people wanted to help get it done. Leave a comment, let me know what you think whether positive or negative, and if you want to help, 100% reach out and let’s get it done. I’m skilled with software engineering in general, but I’m actually not too familiar in particular with web backends and AJAX, so someone more skilled than I am could probably help this along in a huge way. Specific things that might be useful:
If you want to run a peer or instance and help test the system
If you can help with coding
If you have feedback on these ideas in general, either positive or else things I’ve overlooked or need to adjust
Hope to hear from you and thank you for reading my wall of text. Let me know what you think + cheers to you.
What’s the right term for what I’m calling an “instance operator”? I realize that anyone could be one, I just need some language to use to distinguish the people who are from the people who aren’t.
Everything Wordpress is heavily infested with that. However you don’t have to let it impact you – it kind of looks to me like they pressure commercial vendors to put their stuff under the GPL if they’re wanting to offer a free version, so there’s a robust ecosystem of actually-FOSS tooling for it. My experience has been that it’s always worked pretty well in practice; you just have to keep your nope-I’m-not-paying-for-your-paid-version goggles firmly affixed. (Also, side note, GPT does an excellent job of writing little functions.php snippets for you to enable particular custom functionality for your Wordpress install when you need it.)