I’m starting this thread so that folks I’ve poked to share their Ares first impressions have a place to do so.
Hey!
Obviously there’s a lot to cover. Generally, I’m really loving Ares and I think you’ve got something really great. My favorite thing about the game is the web portal. Being able to see your scene as it progresses is A++, and its many features are excellent. My only complaint there is that, for some reason, the poses stop updating after about twenty minutes and I need to refresh the page. Also, I’m logged out of the web portal far more than I am on other sites. I’d like it to be changed to keep me logged in for 30 days. As far as what’s in-game… I’m sorry to say, I don’t like the help files. They are far too long. 
They are thorough, which is nice, but I would recommend splitting them apart and adding suggested help pages/commands on the bottom of each help file. I do LOVE building, though (I’ve built most of the grid so far, and I’m happy to say it’s been a breeze). I would like to see the ability to change or alter the name of an exit, though, to avoid spam when the exit leads to a room with a long name. EX: (SFO) Denver - Municipal Building: Second Floor Office is pretty spammy in the list of exits. Even if it could be changed to: (SFO) Second Floor Office, accepting only the last three words of the name, that’d be great!
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Thanks for the feedback @Rob!
I actually thought there was a way to change the name of the exit, but apparently I never got around to implementing that! Thanks for pointing that out.
I will also extend the login timeout. It was pretty arbitrary to begin with.
I haven’t seen the 20m scene timeout you describe, but I will check it out and see if I can reproduce it.
As for the help files - I hear you and understand your concerns. It is a departure from traditional MU help files, but that’s deliberate.
You may find the quickref (qr <topic>) command to be more helpful to you in-game to look up the syntax for specific commands.
It may help to understand that the help files were designed for reading on the web. They’re more guides than the traditional ‘man page’ type help files found on MUs, which really aren’t very newbie-friendly. On the web, I think it’s actually pretty annoying to have the files split into multiple topics that you have to click through repeatedly to find what you’re looking for. So that’s the philosophy behind why it is the way it is.
Hey, thanks for the reply!
It may help to understand that the help files were designed for reading on the web. They’re more guides than the traditional ‘man page’ type help files found on MUs, which really aren’t very newbie-friendly. On the web, I think it’s actually pretty annoying to have the files split into multiple topics that you have to click through repeatedly to find what you’re looking for. So that’s the philosophy behind why it is the way it is.
Makes sense.
I look forward to future development! You rock!
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Oh actually - there is a way to override the exit destination name - by giving the exit a short description with the shortdesc command. The building helpfile incorrectly says to use the desc command, but it’s actually shortdesc. I will fix the help file.
I thought I’d implemented that! LOL 
Just an update before I forget - I’m pretty sure the scene timeout was on our end, and it’s been fixed. We had an ssl setting that went missing that @glitch added back in to fix a websocket problem.
Oh good. I’m glad you found it. @Glitch, was that problem fixed as of the websocket code you pointed me at the other day, or is there another fix I’d need?
The config setting for ssl disappeared at some point, so I just had to add it back in to the server.yml file for it to work again. I’m not sure if that has any relation to what Rob is talking about, but with websockets down, there’d have been no updates on the front-end.
The shortdesc is working for exits. Thanks!
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I can confirm that the websocket stuff on the web portals seems fixed. I think I was the person who tripped on the web client not connecting and nothing updating right in real time first. But all of that works now!
Furthermore, the integration of client-game and the website in Ares is particularly spectacular, now that I’ve actually gotten to use it properly. It is VERY nice to not have to log into the game for everything, even just for things like checking mail and forums.
It also allowed me to jump back into a scene briefly from my phone when my computer decided to update at the worst time, the way Windows loves to do.
The downside of all this integration is that sometimes if you mess something up on the webpage it alerts the entire game. I tried to post a completed scene and missed the small checkbox about ‘post completed scene’ and so I accidentally started and active scene. When I stopped it, because I knew that wasn’t what I wanted, the whole game was alerted that a scene was completed. It was also hard to delete the accidentally started scene, I don’t think I actually managed that.
Chargen from the website was also nice and easy, especially compared to some past systems. I would’ve liked a warning I overspent on XP when I did it and not just when I tried to continue through chargen. (Possibly it did this and I missed it, but I didn’t think I got a warning until I completed stating and tried to move on.)
Related to this, I do find the words instead of dots/numbers in stats are often confusing. It makes a sheet look less intimidatingly ‘numbers heavy’ for the non-tabletop crowd (and probably reduces some desire to min/max). But the scaling can be confusing without the context of knowing/memorizing what the full scale is. However, in the Language section, the words work MUCH better than numbers, because we have a casual understanding of what it means to be conversational or fluent in a language without any other metric.
The scenes code is very nice, now that I have a helpfile to refer to every time I want to use it. The auto-logging and auto-posting takes so much work out logs. And it makes it much harder to lose them.
We did notice a potential issue in the code, though. When starting a scene in a room with just ‘scene/start’ the scene would stop itself every time someone joined it using a ‘meetme’ and had to be restarted and rejoined again.
Overall, though, a positive experience with the new system from an old Mu*er.
Thanks for the feedback @Kez.
The only time I can think of where the entire game might be alerted to a completed scene is if it brings you over an achievement threshold, which should be a pretty uncommon occurrence. (Though I understand it’s a little annoying when it happened.)
Is there some other situation where that sort of thing occurred?
I understand it’s not for everyone, but you hit upon the reasons why it was done that way.
That sounds very annoying, and certainly not the intended behavior. I am unable to reproduce that issue on my test game, though. Does it happen with every scene? Only scenes started from the web portal? Scenes started in public rooms? Is there a message displayed when it happens? Any additional information you could provide will help figure out what the problem might be.
Yeah, it was blasting out achievements for every scene completed. Although it may have stopped doing that now. I don’t think that happened last night.
I’ve had it happen with two scenes. I can’t quite remember the circumstances the first time, though they were similar.
The most recent time I went to a public room did ‘scene/start’ and it started a scene in the room. Then I sent a meetme for the scene. When that person arrived in the room, and I posed, we were informed there was no scene running (sorry I don’t have the exact wording of the prompt here). So the other person did ‘scene/start’ and started a new scene. We got a few rounds in before a third person asked to join. They were sent a meetme and when they arrived someone posed and were we told there was no scene in the room. So we had to rejoin the active scene by number and keep posing. After that everything was fine.
I personally wasn’t using a web portal or the website for this, though someone else may have been.
Thanks for the additional info!
So far it’s been really great! I love the ease of going between web and client, and everything looks/feels really clean and intuitive on the web-side.
Things I would like to see:
- I use the up arrow to go the last thing I typed, but honestly any command to do that. Ease of reading mail, but also keeps me from losing poses or mis-sent mail, or whatever.
- The webclient auto-jumps to the bottom when there’s new activity. I can see some pros for this, but I find it really frustrating when I’m trying to catch up on poses or read a helpfile, etc.
- In theory this has been fixed, so maybe it’s just my browser, but I still don’t get a notification on the tab when there’s new activity in the webclient. I will forget it’s there without visual cues.
- Ability to buy spells/skills/etc through the website. Particularly after buying things that way in CG, which was so great and easy, I’d love to keep doing it that way.
That’s all I have for now! I may have more once I’ve played with more features.
Thank you!
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Thanks for the feedback!
I’m used to this sort of thing being a client-side feature, like ctrl-p on SimpleMU. Are you talking about having an in-game command? Or did you mean in the “Play via Web Client” screen?
- The webclient auto-jumps to the bottom when there’s new activity. I can see some pros for this, but I find it really frustrating when I’m trying to catch up on poses or read a helpfile, etc.
I can see how that would be annoying. I’ll see what I can do.
- In theory this has been fixed, so maybe it’s just my browser, but I still don’t get a notification on the tab when there’s new activity in the webclient. I will forget it’s there without visual cues.
Browser notifications, unfortunately, are very browser-specific in their behavior and impacted by things like trusted site settings and whether the game is running on http or https. If you let me know which browser and which game, we can check your settings.
- Ability to buy spells/skills/etc through the website. Particularly after buying things that way in CG, which was so great and easy, I’d love to keep doing it that way.
Sure, XP via the web is on the list for someday. For spells, you’d have to talk to @Tat though, as that’s a game-specific feature 
I’m on it! Or rather, it’s on my list. One day. Eventually.
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My players keep paging themselves. I’m debating updating the locale but I don’t know how to fix this!
Beyond that, we’re having some hard learning curve about the web-portal. Like, that it exists? And does stuff? I’m sure it’ll work itself out soon, but just something I noticed.
Besides that, everyone seems thrilled!
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