#pennmush

You know why they call me the Jew, in Hopkinton, my hometown?

I collect lighters, by payment primarily, sometimes by accidental theft.

I have over 60 in my apartment, not the ones I threw out, for being out of juice.

I buy them whenever I go to the store for a pack of cigarettes.

Sometimes, people outside of town, are confused as to what The Jew is.

They think I'm Hebrew.

I'm just a cowboy.

I'm American Lodge, too, none of this queer shit, with the Canadian Lodge, the Furs and Lancasters.

American Lodge, famous American war criminal that Britain finds objectionable.

I killed a Redcoat Jewish assassin, War of 1812, targeting the First Lady.

Plus homophobic transphobic anti-Semitic heterosexual ADHD, a US Presidential candidate.

Since Washington.

Every winner, except Trump.

Ignored Prom and saved a man from being gay, spotted a Klanswoman and saved her with Camille the Queen Consort's kinsman, a Tory President.

I'm genetic First Nations, therefore eligible for a Selectman's position or above, in US politics, without an accusation of being a National Socialist, unlike Obama and Trump, both Polyanders, non-Natives.

George Washington was full blood Mohecan.

I have Madison, Fourth President, MI-6 sleeper agent, as a direct ancestor, through Jeanette McCullem, Dolly's savior, and I'm cousins with Polk, father, and Kennedy, mother.

Sworn foes, through Tyrone, with the Fenslings, the Nazis.

I'm a bondage sub, therefore against the pornography trade of sexually trafficked semen and pornography actors and actresses, and art or clown school writers out of France.

Don’t read comics, but I understand them, as petty literature to trap bully victims into a space where they’re bullies, so they don’t offend as sex offenders.  You come up with a complex formula, then simplify it into a script, for your artist’s ease.

Superman, Ivan Tomasic, spotted me, by living with me, after he got sent to prison, and I had a psychotic break.

Batman, is a US President, that never made it.

Superman, meanwhile, is a prison convict, given a second chance at life, as a cop.

Batman, has to be racist, to survive, he’s a gangster.

I’ve got a small project in the works that may or may not take root in the same way that SceneSys did. The idea is a Graph-Based SQL database backend for PennMUSH storage. This means that instead of storing everything on a character, or your BBoard on boards, or your helpfiles on objects, you’ll be storing it in a Graph-format on SQL. 

Problem is of course, SQL hardly supports Graph-based things on a large scale. But datasets in PennMUSH are rarely that sizable. I’d loved to have used OQGraph, but it’s simply too unreliable. It loves to crash the SQL server. 

So instead I’ve gone over to the far less capable Stored Procedures... and so far, this is what I’ve worked up with a _great_ deal of help from http://www.artfulsoftware.com/ - to the point that I’m basically copying their stuff, and then enhancing it for my needs:

http://pastebin.com/BVgxMzkH http://pastebin.com/JMFBdZDa

I already have a Proof of Concept working on my TestMUSH: (Currently: telnet://twilightdays.org:7705)

Here is a guide on how to install SceneSys:

* GitHub page: here.

Choose if you want constant updates or not. If you do, log onto M*U*S*H at mush.pennmush.org:4201 and ask for Walker to connect the SVC bot to your MUSH (Recommended). If not, look through this list for the most recent version. If you need any help with any of these steps, contact me at M*U*S*H or on Final Kingdom MUSH.

Make sure you have the following items installed on your system: MySQL, PHP5, Apache2, PHPmyadmin.

On PHPmyadmin, use the root/admin user to create a new database, OR, use one of your old databases. Now use the SQL tab and paste in what is found on the GitHub site.

Go into your pennmush/game folder, and replace the existing text in the GETDATE.TEMPLATE file with the information found on the GitHub site.

If using the SVC bot, use the following commands that follow underneath at step 6. If not, use the installer and skip to step 7. 

Ensure that you do these one at a time, until the commands seem to indicate they are 'done'.

+svc create SVC SceneSys=Mercutio_SceneSys NULL +svc checkout +svc client SVC SceneSys

@tel first(get(SVC SceneSys/LOCAL`OBJMAP),:)=config(master_room) th ansi(hr,SceneSys object is DBref [first(get(SVC SceneSys/LOCAL`OBJMAP),:)])!

Look at the attributes found in DATA`SQL`DATABASE and the leaves under DATA`SQL`TABLE in case you changed database settings from the standard.

Using Myrddin's BBoard system, create a new board for the Scheduler to post to. +bbnewgroup Scene Announcements

Edit the DATA`SCHEDULEBOARD attribute to the 'number' of the Schedule Board (alternatively, set it to its name), and edit DATA`SCHEDULEBOARD_DB to give it the DBref that was made for the schedule board. (@find Scene Announcements)

Ensure you have an isic() function, or otherwise edit the FN`IS`IC function for it. The system should only be recording when someone is IC!

Ensure you have a ancestor_player set (@config ancestor_player)

@trig Scene System/DATA`INSTALL`ANCESTOR

Assuming you don't mind us changing the way your @emit, SAY, POSE and SEMIPOSE work, go to the next step. If you don't want this, you're most likely going to need to get some help from me personally on how to set up your game.  

@trigger Scene System/startup. 

PHP files are here: the wiki page is set up specifically for a type of Form for SymanticMediawiki. If you want help with this, contact me, or wait for a later Tutorial. You want to change the db.php file with your own information. It is highly recommended you use a seperate user for this, which is only able to 'select' from the SQL database. That way, you can be sure in the knowledge that nothing insecure will happen. Files are found on the GitHub site.

First off, this tutorial will concentrate on using Debian 7. It will also presume you know what a MUSH is, and how to connect to one! If your VPS uses an older Distro, say Debian 6, or if you decide you really rather have Ubuntu, I suggest logging in onto M*U*S*H for assistance. 

M*U*S*H can be found at: mush.pennmush.org 4201 

Tools:

VPS: First, you need to have a VPS. I personally suggest CloudVPS as one of the better cost:stuff ratios out there. They're a Dutch company, and if you drag everything to the Minimum (which is more than your MUSH will need by far), you'll only be paying ~ €10.95

SSH Client: A lot of people swear by PuTTy, but I'm going to keep this simpler. I suggest you get the Windows client called Bitvise Tunnelier. Found here. Its setup should speak for itself. We'll get to 'how to connect to your VPS' during the Tutorial. If you are using a Mac, it comes with 'terminal' built in. Please refer to this tutorial for Mac's SSH client.

Let's assume you have gotten a VPS, and you selected that you wanted Debian 7 as your Linux Distro. You should be given some IP address that you can 'connect' to. An IP address will most likely come in IPv4 and IPv6 flavor. You won't need to worry about that, but let's just use the IPv4 for the sake of sanity. It'll look something like: 33.423.54.121 or something.

Now, let's connect to it. Open up Bitvise Tunnelier (Bitvise SSH Client.exe). You should also have been given a username and password for the 'root' account on your system. First, let's log in. Fill the following sections out with the information given by your VPS provider.

Host: IPv4 address goes here. Port: 22 (~ most likely, just leave it alone) Username: root Initial Method: Password Password: Your VPS password for root

Click Login. If it doesn't succeed, be sure to doublecheck that you copied and did everything succesfully.

You are now logged in as root. We don't actually want you to be doing stuff 'as' root though. So let's make you a proper user account. I suggest to keep your username in lower caps, without any special symbols like spaces - for simplicity's sake. (one command)

useradd --create-home yourusername --password yourpassword

Now we need them to also be able to do administrative stuff. We do this by adding them to the '''sudo''' list. (Super User Do. This should be simply if you are on Debian 7:  (one command)

adduser foo sudo

Now, log out (command: logout) and change the information for your login in the Bitvise Tunnelier. By this time, when you finish putting in your new user's username and password, you probably want to 'save' the information, and heck, you can have it save your password. It should be safe, as it gets stored in a secure manner. You'll be using this now and again in case your game goes down for whatever reason, or because you want to do more!

Now come the actual fun PennMUSH related stuff. Let's make sure you have the bare minimum of stuff! Let's first make sure you can sudo, using a simple command that doesn't really need sudo: (one command)

sudo ls

Note that it'll ask for your password. I hope you remember your password! Also note that you won't /see/ that you are typing things in. It won't 'appear' on your Bitvise xterm program. But trust me, each keystroke is being fed in. Press enter when done typing your password. If succesful, you won't need to run your password again for the rest of this 'session' (opening until closing your 'terminal').

Let's ensure we have all the packages, and some extra just in case. (one command)

sudo apt-get install build-essential git perl libpcre3 libpcre3-dev openssl nano libevent-core* libevent-dev libssl-dev mysql-common mysql-client mysql-server libmysqlclient-dev

Let's download the latest PennMUSH (one command)

git clone https://github.com/pennmush/pennmush.git

And run all the required commands, one at a time. When you hit 'make update', just press 'enter' a few times on each 'question' to use all the defaults.

cd pennmush sh configure   make update make install

Now, for the last steps. Go to the game folder by using: 

cd game

(Change Directory). There's one file in particular you are going to want to edit. And to do so, we're going to use the program 'nano'. Type in the following to edit the mush configuration file. (mush.cnf). Controls you are going to want to know are: CTRL-O (As in Ooooh) to save the current file. Ctrl-X to exit.

nano mush.cnf

You will likely want to change a few. Your mud_name etc is important. You can leave the port alone, or set it to something more memorable than the PennMUSH default of 4201. You will want to come back here later to change your connect_html_file or connect_file items to #DBref/Attribute references if you want to make things easier on yourself. Probably also want to change some of the Ancestor references (without the # in the DBref).

Last step! To start your game running on the port indicated in mush.cnf, run the following: 

sh restart

http://svc.pennmush.org/installers/Mercutio_SceneSys_73.txt

I've now reached a point where SceneSys is almost packagable. I just need to do a few more things, because I can probably make it so that it 'automatically installs' with some very simple commands run.

A few years ago, I started that section on the PennMUSH community blog. It's good to look back at one's past, and I think this was one of my best moments. Even now, there are still people who use the information there; including myself.

I know there's at least one game now which is using SceneSys, as I've helped them install it; and there's another where it is being suggested as a startup item. 

In setting up SceneSys on Tenebrae MUSH's dev server, I found some simple bugs that were in need of fixing, but nothing too weird. I found a few times where in fact, the way I coded things allowed for easy expansion, so that made me happy. I'm glad they saw the Light and switched over from TinyMUX to PennMUSH.

I recently (finally) made the simple addition to make idle scenes go proper idle - it took me a while to figure out the SQL statement. Luckily, Mike@M*U*S*H helped me half the way there. 

This is a prepared statement in Walker's SQL Prep Format running my Extensions ~ and could probably do with improvement:

SELECT scene_id FROM ( SELECT DISTINCT config.`scene_id`,`scene_ctime`,MAX(`pose_time`) as pose_time,`timeout_unfinished` FROM `$DATABASE$`.`$POSES$` as poses INNER JOIN `$DATABASE$`.`$CONFIG$` as config ON poses.`scene_id`=config.`scene_id` AND `scene_state` IN ('0','1') GROUP BY config.`scene_id` ) as groupedcontent WHERE NOT ( (`pose_time` BETWEEN (NOW()- INTERVAL `timeout_unfinished` SECOND) AND NOW()) OR (`scene_ctime` BETWEEN (NOW()- INTERVAL `timeout_unfinished` SECOND) AND NOW() ) )

So where should I go from here? 

Providing updates will probably have to become a 'thing' at some point, after all; I am not done yet. This thing can become more robust. It can use some code enhancements. The new named variables from PennMUSH are likely to be a useful thing, especially within the mapsql() function. The Scene Recall system could certainly use a touch-up, as it is visually not too appealing, and could use @mapsql.