Laufeyjarson writes…

In City of Heroes you can use a few variables in messages. They start with $ and will be replaced with the relevant text for your character. I never found a complete list. Here it is:

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Original air dates April through May of 1964.

The Doctor, Susan, Barbara, and Ian wind up on Marinus, and are blackmailed into finding some “keys” needed to operate a planetary mind-control machine.  Hijinks ensue. (more…)

I’ve had to work this week, so haven’t done much interesting. Today’s been a bit odd as we’ve had flaky electricity and Internet due to a huge thunderstorm that’s moving past. Giant, rolling peals of thunder shaking the buildings. It’s made work a challenge.

More next week, when I’m on vacation again.

Foswiki has enough access controls to allow it to handle players and games.  If you set it up properly, it works very well.

Step 1: Install Foswiki

Follow the installation instructions.  Using CGI is easiest to set up, if you watch the gotcha I found with running bin/configure.  FCGI is much faster, and works well once you install the extension, and if your host supports it.  (Mine does!)

I have had a little trouble getting the Apache config right, and have had to make several changes to get it working in my webserver configuration.  Make sure the virtual host is correct (not the default *), that the logs are as you want them, and to add a redirect for / to /foswiki/ if you want that.

Step 2: Configure Foswiki

Use the bin/configure script to configure Foswiki.  Mostly this is paths and mail.  Add the FastCGI if you want to use that.

Step 3: Add Admin Users

I like to create a user (or users) for administration and put them in the AdminGroup so they have full rights to everything.  This is easier than using the special admin user.  I like to create a “FirstnameAdmin” user – I’m LouAdmin, usually – for each administrator.  Get the admin to create them and then use the magic ‘admin’ user to add them to the AdminGroup.

Step 4: Add Game Groups

For each game, you’ll want two groups.  GamePlayers and GameGMs.  Create them, using tools in Main/WikiGroups

Step 5: Add Users

Have the GM(s) and player(s) create accounts.  Add them appropriately to the GM and Player groups for each game.  The GMs does not have to be in the player group.

Step 6: Add Webs

Create a Web for GamePlayers and GameGMs.  (System/ManagingWebs).  Then, set each of those to be limited to the the correct groups.  Go to the WebPreferences setting for each web (GamePlayers/WebPreferences, for example) and update ALLOWWEBVIEW to the appropriate groups.  The Player web should have the players and the GMs, and the GMs should have only the GMs.

The GM web should look something like this:

• Set DENYWEBVIEW =
• Set ALLOWWEBVIEW = %USERSWEB%.GameGMsGroup, %USERSWEB%.AdminGroup
• Set DENYWEBCHANGE =
• Set ALLOWWEBCHANGE =
• Set DENYWEBRENAME =
• Set ALLOWWEBRENAME =

The Players web is the same, but includes the players in ALLOWWEBVIEW:

• Set ALLOWWEBVIEW = %USERSWEB%.GameGMsGroup, %USERSWEB%.GamePlayersGroup, %USERSWEB%.AdminGroup

I have run Role Playing Games (RPGs) for some time, and played in them for longer.  One of the things that comes up as useful is ways for the players to sort and organize their notes, discoveries, etc., and for the Game Master (GM) to do the same thing.

In this modern age, where many (if not all) of the people at my gaming table have laptops or tablets, the use of a Wiki should be perfect.  However, many wikis have a strong feeling of “The Wiki Way”, which says everyone should be able to see and edit everything so that the experience and knowledge of everyone can be gathered and stored.

There’s at least two problems with this for a gaming Wiki.  First, the gaming Wiki’s probably on the Internet, where “anyone can edit” translates into “instantly defaced by spammers”.  That’s not ever good, and it seems to be ignored by many of the Wiki packages.

The second problem is that the GM needs a private place on the Wiki to conspire against the players.  If there’s more than one GM collaborating, they need to share information.  The players need to be kept out, so the things there can be a surprise when the game plays out.

It’s great if the players have a place to put their collective notes and information as well.  Some GMs want access to those, and some won’t.  Some will think these should be hidden to only players in the game, and some won’t.  (If the player characters are doing anything salacious or gaming anything subversive, it is perhaps best not to have those on Google.)

Enter Foswiki.  Foswiki allows access control by groups.  The next articles will detail how to set up Foswiki for RPG use.

In response to a question I posted on the Catalyst list, Tomas Doran (among other suggestions) posted a beautifully devious way to add additional capabilites to your application for test purposes.

When you’re testing with Catalyst::Test and running a local test, you don’t actually fire up a web server and talk over the wire.  It loads your program’s library in to the test script, and calls the functions with the same objects given to it by the other servers.

Your Cat app runs, but all as functions in your program.

Since this is your program – and a test script is just a funny Perl program – you can load libraries and add additional things to the namespace.

Tomas Doran pointed out the other day, in a post on the Catalyst mailing list, that you could manipulate the session data between test calls if you needed to.

My original question was about manipulating what user was logged by playing with the cookie cache, but it should apply to any value in the session.  You could check them, to see that the internal state of your program is what you think it is, or you could fiddle with them, to test that it does the right things.