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[Shakerag]

Hey I missed you especially Tiruin.

She's easier to hit if you distract her first.

[doll]

Since it's sort of lost in the thread I'll repost this here:

I'm gonna have to ask for a replacement.

[ToonyMan]

Hi gang, sorry I disappeared off the face of the planet. I got a bit burned out on mafia and I'd managed to create a mammoth task of busy-work with the last game I was running-- then I felt bad for leaving before properly tying it off.

How's it all going? Anything new? I got really busy! I help run a bookshop now and I've got a game being published with Choice of Games in July.

I'm still really fond of mafia and can remember great moments in many of the games. In practice I think the way most of them are structured is too much commitment for too little pay-off.

I feel like if I ever made a game it would be in a CYOA style. I wasn't even aware these Choice of Games...games even existed.

I'm always interested in interactive fiction works so let's see what the future holds.

[FallacyofUrist]

Oh hey, you two are back. More blood for the mafia machine.

[TolyK]

Speaking of mafia machine...

I've started a Python project on GitHub for a mafia engine. I tried doing this before in C#, but it was too slow and rigid (and I had a poor idea of how to implement it, anyways). Given I've put more thought into it now, and have much more experience in Python, I conjured up a skeleton of a project here. The idea is to make a working, flexible representation of Mafia-style games (normal mafia/werewolf, as well as BYOR's and other setups with crazy roles) and automatically evaluate actions.

This is mostly to aid mods (GM's) to:
- do most of the work during set-up (in order to do less while the game is running);
- create consistent games (in terms of rules);
- lower # of errors when computing actions;
- (eventually) easily set up games, count votes, and compute actions.

Useful side-effects of this:
- games can be standardized, and thus saved in some well-structured representation (instead of a load of PM's and "this guy actioned this", which is hard for even humans to parse...);
- (standardized) saved games can be later analyzed to varying degrees of complexity - this could allow, for example, to not do the dreaded parsing of games by hand if I or other people want to do machine learning related to mafia;
- one could build a phone app (or one-per-platform) so that people can play IRL without playing or specialized cards (and "noises" and such...) and with potentially more interesting roles. Think about playing a BYOR IRL and all the bs that can go down.


I'm writing here instead of making a post, because:
- I've already made a post for a mafia project before (the machine learning one) which didn't really get off the ground;
- I want to have tangible results before posting. Currently, all I have is a paper design document, a detailed representation in my head, and a skeleton Python program. I haven't been able to think of a role that's been done before that can't be done with my framework, but a lot of low-level details are missing.

If you're interested in helping (coding, or helping refine ideas), or even just supporting ("hey man that's cool" is enough to encourage me ), that would be swell.

<3 you all.

[flabort]

Well, I could just say "hey man that's cool", but I feel that would be a cop-out.
It's REALLY cool.

You realize that when this is done, it and it's API would be the most powerful GMs tools for mafia ever?
It could be used to even make better NPCs - albeit it's gonna require the API to be finished first

[Tiruin]

Well, I could just say "hey man that's cool", but I feel that would be a cop-out.
It's REALLY cool.

I have near 0 knowledge of programing, and TolyK doing something like this (or anyone actually) is just the ♥!
That's not just cool, that's inspiring in its own way. :3

[TolyK]

I have no idea what GM tools there have been for mafia (which is probably dumb - it makes sense to look it up, but whatever ), but hopefully I deliver this well. Currently, I'm working on making a Mountainous game work, with hardcoded interactions. I have phase changing, voting and mafiakill done, except nobody actually dies yet, and it's held together by strings. Yay!

[FallacyofUrist]

Don't forget replacements.
~~~
We have literally no mafia games currently running. Hurry up and join Time Paradox Mafia, KOTM 6, or vote for another game(preferably FBYOR 3) in the threshold thread!

[TolyK]

Update on the mafia engine thingie.

I got a Mountainous (T vanilla town + M vanilla mafia players) game to work in it.
That includes:

• Working out actions as they come up, automatically, e.g.:
  
  • Vote is a day action, and every vote is captured by a VoteTally, and when the phase changes it lynches the player with the most votes (or none, if there is a tie).
  • MKill (Mafia kill) is a night action, and it fails if an MKill has already been used that night.
  • Alignments are tracked; if all members of an alignment die, then the game ends.
• Automatically saving and loading the game, without writing (much) additional code!
  
  • This is very important, e.g. to be able to resume a game from scratch, or for writing configs to load from later.
  • The config is in YAML format, so it's very human-readable (and technically human-writable)
• A command-line interface where one inputs actions (incl. phase changes and such) and recieves "what happened" (along with logging info, currently...)

Now, I'm a bit stumped as to what to do next (there are a lot of options), which is mainly why I'm writing this post.
Here are some possible directions to go:

• Add more abilities and stock roles and setups (e.g. doctor, alignment/role cop, godfather, roleblocker + their combinations) - useful in a library, and needs to be done eventually, but a lot of "hooks" need to be made, and these might require rewriting when other features are done.
• Make a more friendly UI (probably still command-line though) so that mods can run it at home more easily.
• Spend time cleaning up and formalizing code - helpful, but only if other people end up working on this project too.
• Make a mafia bot for IRC - good testing platform, but few users. Requires addition of stock roles to be interesting, though.
• Make a mafia bot for Bay12Forums - hardest of this list to do, but probably the most applicable. For this I need to figure out how to do PM's, start threads, etc.

To anyone who plans to mod a game in the (relatively near) future:
Would you like to test the engine out? Your game needs to have a fixed setup, though. I could make the roles beforehand, and you'd test it out, likely making the whole modding process (during the game) very easy.

To anyone just watching development:
I'd love any input, such as suggestions for what to focus on next, or things you'd like the engine to be able to do, or just to say what awesome stuff I'm doing.

P.S. I updated the documentation a little while ago, it's lower on the page here, and there's a screenshot of it in action here:

Spoiler: Example game (slightly older version) (click to show/hide)

[Mephansteras]

I'd go for set-ups and UI first. Make it useful and easy to use, worry about automation (especially Forum) later.

[notquitethere]

Hey gang,. what's occurring?

If you were ever wondering what my favourite word is, here's an interview about my upcoming game release that settles the question.

[TheDarkStar]

Welcome back NQT!

[TolyK]

Ooh, that's your voice? It's not how I imagined it, but now I'm going to unintentially read your posts in that voice.

Also, Animal Farm, an RNG dystopia generator, and other stuff? You must really have a lot of extra time. 


In terms of what's happening in Bay12 mafia, there are 2 games running (KOTM and Time Paradox Mafia) and a sort of lull in player activity otherwise, I've been making a mafia engine in Python (see above), and ... well, that's about it, really.

[hector13]

Aye, we're slowly dying here. I don't think that's aided by our attitude to new players, even during the BMs.