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Show HN: Noric-bot – A bot to stress-test text-based MUDs, written in Scala 3

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Re: Show HN: Noric-bot – A bot to stress-test text-based MUDs, written in Scala 3

#51

Post by redwall_hp »

lokl wrote: post #32

I was an admin (wiz) on various MUDs and MUSHs many, many years ago, and of course an avid user. The mix of programming, creativity, and camaraderie was sometimes very special. Maybe my recollections are clouded by nostalgia, but it sometimes felt like a hacker fantasy, coding, role-playing, and working together for good (fun). I wish I could recapture that feeling, I wish there were time for it, and I wish there wer…

If it were marketed correctly ("literary gaming" or something), I could see a modern variation of a MUD gaining some traction if it were browser based and styled up in way that's a little more accessible, with some other modern conveniences.

Kind of like how Discord and Slack are just a coat of contemporary Web-isms on top of the same old idea as IRC.

Re: Show HN: Noric-bot – A bot to stress-test text-based MUDs, written in Scala 3

#52

Post by mruts »

beders wrote: post #40
mihaifm wrote: post #16

Cool project, but why engage in language flame war on the project readme: > I think Scala is the best mainstream language with a sophisticated type system. Sophisticated type systems are money in the bank. Going from TypeScript to Scala is like going from JavaScript to TypeScript.

> Sophisticated type systems are money in the bank. You better have money in the bank to allow for all the refactoring you will be doing once you realize your data model needs to change in unforeseen ways ;)

That's going to be harder in a dynamic language. In fact, sophisticated type systems are supposed to (and do) solve these problems very elegantly.

Re: Show HN: Noric-bot – A bot to stress-test text-based MUDs, written in Scala 3

#53

Post by dmit »

paulddraper wrote: post #48
mruts wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I bet it comes from either shapeless or anorm or mything.MyObject. Moreover, how is this different from literally any other programming language? Also, I would venture to guess that almost all programmers regardless of the language or editor/IDE they are using have some sort of jump to definition function they use all the time. At least with Scala I can actually see the source of the definition reliably, which…

JavaScript or TypeScript don't have the problem (except for globals, but those are usually few and far between). Python doesn't have this problem (unless you use wildcard imports, which is often recommend against [1]). Java does not have this problem, except for protected/internal classes which have only local use anyway (yes there are wildcard imports, but they are rather rare [2]). Go has this problem for files in…

How can you say "_____ doesn't have this problem (unless you use wildcard imports" when all of the languages you listed allow wildcard imports? (Or just dump all their garbage symbols in a global namespace.)

Re: Show HN: Noric-bot – A bot to stress-test text-based MUDs, written in Scala 3

#54

Post by zubspace »

spir wrote: post #50
zubspace wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How useful is this test tool to you? What bugs did you find or do you hope to find this way? How often and long do you run it? I'm asking, because I guess, it probably takes ages to traverse some kind of dungeon. If there are special sequences, the tool will most likely never find them (like find key, open door, kill boss), right? I've done some small games in my spare time, but Unit-Testing was either completely use…

noric-bot has been extremely useful as a test tool, if a bit narrow due to just spamming random cmds. To your point, the bot in its present form can't automatically run a dungeon or verify edge cases. A previous version of the server codebase was written in ruby[1]. The playable branch of that repo has a combat demo that's a bit fun, however the performance is so terrible that I shelved the whole codebase years ago.…

Wow, fascinating! Sounds like a huge undertaking.

Wish you good luck and fun, and hopefully we'll hear from your MMORPG again. Would love to read more about the technical challenges of your game. :)

Re: Show HN: Noric-bot – A bot to stress-test text-based MUDs, written in Scala 3

#55

Post by owl57 »

paulddraper wrote: post #48
mruts wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I bet it comes from either shapeless or anorm or mything.MyObject. Moreover, how is this different from literally any other programming language? Also, I would venture to guess that almost all programmers regardless of the language or editor/IDE they are using have some sort of jump to definition function they use all the time. At least with Scala I can actually see the source of the definition reliably, which…

JavaScript or TypeScript don't have the problem (except for globals, but those are usually few and far between). Python doesn't have this problem (unless you use wildcard imports, which is often recommend against [1]). Java does not have this problem, except for protected/internal classes which have only local use anyway (yes there are wildcard imports, but they are rather rare [2]). Go has this problem for files in…

> for things such as implicits whose whole purpose is to not be explicitly named.

Now that's an interesting perspective on a language that seems too magic. A whole ecosystem of objects who must not be named!

Re: Show HN: Noric-bot – A bot to stress-test text-based MUDs, written in Scala 3

#56

Post by paulddraper »

dmit wrote: post #53
paulddraper wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript or TypeScript don't have the problem (except for globals, but those are usually few and far between). Python doesn't have this problem (unless you use wildcard imports, which is often recommend against [1]). Java does not have this problem, except for protected/internal classes which have only local use anyway (yes there are wildcard imports, but they are rather rare [2]). Go has this problem for files in…

How can you say " _____ doesn't have this problem (unless you use wildcard imports " when all of the languages you listed allow wildcard imports? (Or just dump all their garbage symbols in a global namespace.)

Like I said, in practical terms, this turns out to be a much bigger issue for a random selection of Scala than a random selection of Java/TypeScript/Python.

Just like every language has an untyped/unsafe method of operation. But some languages use that sparingly; others have that for the whole language.

Re: Show HN: Noric-bot – A bot to stress-test text-based MUDs, written in Scala 3

#57

Post by pmiller2 »

redwall_hp wrote: post #51
lokl wrote: post #32

I was an admin (wiz) on various MUDs and MUSHs many, many years ago, and of course an avid user. The mix of programming, creativity, and camaraderie was sometimes very special. Maybe my recollections are clouded by nostalgia, but it sometimes felt like a hacker fantasy, coding, role-playing, and working together for good (fun). I wish I could recapture that feeling, I wish there were time for it, and I wish there wer…

If it were marketed correctly ("literary gaming" or something), I could see a modern variation of a MUD gaining some traction if it were browser based and styled up in way that's a little more accessible, with some other modern conveniences. Kind of like how Discord and Slack are just a coat of contemporary Web-isms on top of the same old idea as IRC.

It's been done: https://www.skotos.net/

Re: Show HN: Noric-bot – A bot to stress-test text-based MUDs, written in Scala 3

#58

Post by lastofus »

redwall_hp wrote: post #51
lokl wrote: post #32

I was an admin (wiz) on various MUDs and MUSHs many, many years ago, and of course an avid user. The mix of programming, creativity, and camaraderie was sometimes very special. Maybe my recollections are clouded by nostalgia, but it sometimes felt like a hacker fantasy, coding, role-playing, and working together for good (fun). I wish I could recapture that feeling, I wish there were time for it, and I wish there wer…

If it were marketed correctly ("literary gaming" or something), I could see a modern variation of a MUD gaining some traction if it were browser based and styled up in way that's a little more accessible, with some other modern conveniences. Kind of like how Discord and Slack are just a coat of contemporary Web-isms on top of the same old idea as IRC.

This seems to be the end goal of https://writtenrealms.com/. A lot of time was spent making the UI responsive and work well on mobile resolutions!

Re: Show HN: Noric-bot – A bot to stress-test text-based MUDs, written in Scala 3

#59

Post by spir »

zubspace wrote: post #54
spir wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

noric-bot has been extremely useful as a test tool, if a bit narrow due to just spamming random cmds. To your point, the bot in its present form can't automatically run a dungeon or verify edge cases. A previous version of the server codebase was written in ruby[1]. The playable branch of that repo has a combat demo that's a bit fun, however the performance is so terrible that I shelved the whole codebase years ago.…

Wow, fascinating! Sounds like a huge undertaking. Wish you good luck and fun, and hopefully we'll hear from your MMORPG again. Would love to read more about the technical challenges of your game. :)

Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Noric-bot – A bot to stress-test text-based MUDs, written in Scala 3

#60

Post by atroche »

I've always thought that building a MUD AI would be extremely fun, and a good test for language understanding and reinforcement learning.

Here are a couple of related papers in the deep learning space:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.01628 https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.03094

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