Firstly, thanks are owed to @Faraday for all the hard work on what I think could be a very needed update to how we all MUSH. I’ve been wanting to take the plunge on AresMUSH for some time and I’ve liked what I have seen so far. I wanted to make a post with a mixture of questions and observations.
I set up two servers just to go through the install process: once on a fresh new digitalocean droplet as specified in the documentation, and once on my regular server which has a few other other MUSHes, a website, some MediaWikis, etc. on it already, just to see how it plays on a server that has had me messing around on it for 2+ years.
My main question so far is that I’m curious about any future plans for the hosting of multiple AresMUSH games on a single server. Hoping for this functionality down the line, as the current infrastructure appears to hardcode specific install/deploy locations for the game and web portal files, meaning you can only install one ‘out of the box’ (so far as I can tell, at least).
Related, the install also currently assumes you’re not already running an unrelated website in the /var/www/html location. Since I was, I needed to dig into the installation and /home/ares/ares-webportal/bin/deploy scripts in order to change those locations to (in my case) /var/www/aresmush/html. I am not sure if there a better way I haven’t found.
A more minor thing: when the install is asking for such things as database location, default ports, etc., I just hit enter at each prompt without inputting anything in the assumption that ‘writing nothing’ would automatically use the defaults. These first few attempts to install didn’t work, which might have been for unrelated reasons, but I started actually manually entering ‘4202,’ ‘4303,’ etc. at the prompts jut to be safe. I’m still not sure whether they can be left blank if you just want to use the defaults. That was one of the main ambiguities I remember along the way.
Otherwise, both installs went pretty well, though on the clean server I did find myself having to run the setup_server script twice due to some issues with Redis not installing properly on the first go-around. I really should have saved the output; if I see it again I will capture it.
I tested playing and logging a scene, which leads to I think my last question for this post: I really liked the formatting of the log while it was an ‘active log’ (where each pose was clearly delineated from the next, and labeled with the poser’s name and avatar) and assumed this format would carry over when the scene was ‘published.’ Once published, however, all the avatars and name labels were removed and the log became a continuous page of text. Would it be possible to just keep that ‘active scene’ format for finished scenes?
Again, however, I like what I have seen so far in terms of ease of use. I’m trying to encourage some friends to use one of my AresMUSH installations for an upcoming small sandbox in order to see how it plays in practice.
