In a similiar vein to (and actually using? probably so) my scripting challengess*, I would like to orginize a scripting chat.
*atm not all of the written questions work, will fix that in 10 or so hours though.
When?
Since not everyone would know about it if we did it in a week or so from now, and we need to enough material for it, it probably should be in August. However, I probably won’t be able to participate if it’s between 1/8 to 6/8, so unless someone else could host it, the best time is probably Friday 11/8, 19:00 UTC, since this is when devchats used to be (I assume they were chosen based on what fits most players? not sure though). This date is just for a conctrete time stamp in case it will really happen (so there won’t be a discussion left in the air without anything happening in the end like Broud’s puzzle race), and I personally won’t mind changing it.
What will we do?
My ideas for that are:
- Intreduce people who didn’t touch js before to scripting in a way that fits the game, for example focusing on manipulations of rna strings, and the basics of jquery.
- Give players riddles and challenges to solve. For example: “Make a script that marks all locked bases, changes all pairs that are supposed to bind with them to a color fitting for that and mark them, and continue as if the marked bases are locked”.
- If I get my coding challenge scripts working fully until then, they could probably be used as riddles as well.
- Maybe one player will have a stream on eterna’s youtube channel on which he will explain to chat via the script editor so they could see what he does? I am not sure how would that go, was there something like that?
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Great idea! Sounds fun and educational
I think this is a great idea. I know that something like this was done a while ago (see http://eternawiki.org/wiki/index.php5/EteRNA_University), but it is hidden in a quiet corner of the Wiki and thus won’t be seen by most players unless they happen to follow the scripting documentation link (which opens this page: http://eternawiki.org/wiki/index.php5/Script_Documentation)
I only recently discovered this information myself and am still learning from the Doc that Machinelves and Eli Fisker put together. I also happened to do a full review of the scripts which have been published and (aside from needing to be better organized based on their function) many of them have mild errors or are out of date in such a way that they no longer work.
In a recent post (https://getsatisfaction.com/eternagame/topics/how-to-solve-major-platform-issues-with-limited-resources) Machinelves emphasized the undeniable necessity to update the coding for the site to improve its performance, maintain relevance, and to resolve longstanding bugs. If funding can’t be found to hire someone to create fixes to bugs and other errors then a homegrown approach may become the only real option. Learning code and especially HTML (which forms the basis of most “scripts”) would empower Eterna players to troubleshoot (at least some of) these problems.
Just as a reminder- the scripting chat will *probably* happen in the 11th. If for some reason I won’t be able to come I will update here.
For all the information about the chat is here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B0r_xLNioGHILXU2a0lmYkNqMnM?usp=sharing
Also I will probably stream it, as it would be much easier to explain and show stuff.