Inter-session communication

[timelyTurnabout]

Lets talk about inter-session communication. Howsat work? One of the vibes I've been getting in the Glitch comments and here is the general attitude that if you've played with someone before, there's a solid chance you won't even be able to communicate with them afterwards when you're in different sessions, usually. Otherwise it's "Yeah this beautiful girl/boy I know from home and we were totally in love, but we both won and now I might not ever see her again SIGNNNNN... Oh yeah but we totally chat long-distance on pesterchum every day, like we did all 13 years of our life before playing." What do you all think? How do we reconcile it with the fora and the gamebro faq servers etc?

[tungstenTinkerer]

The fora as somewhat of a special case.

The team of forum founders actually navigated through the furthest ring to establish a server in a void session. A Muse of Time actually stayed there (and still is) for forum maintenance. Access to the fora is invite-only and requires some sort of beacon-access key called a "trans-temporal tunnel" that may actually be a hardware device.

Anyway, it should be mentioned that while the fora are accessible from anyone everywhere (in their own timeframe as per to avoid weird time shit) that should be treated as an exception. That said, I see no big problems with the fora allowing memebers to chat. There are some issues with timeline encryption and stuff like that that may make it difficult for certain members to interact, but that is easily solved...

[mislaidLullaby]

EDIT: Just saw TT's post, fixed accordingly.

The Forum is hosted in a 'fixed location' in Paradox Space. Let us assume that makes for a 'fixed address'. Once you have this address, or the access key in this case, you can start talking as desired. Relatively simple.

Using chat clients to talk to one another cross-session, though? More tricky. If two people start off together in a session and move to two separate ones, neither knows the 'Address' of the other because of that move. They're left throwing their mail into the dark, so to speak. They cannot communicate.

Now, let's turn this around slightly. Say two people are talking across sessions and one suddenly moves. The person who stayed still cannot reach the other- They don't have the 'address'. However, the person who just moved? They still know where the other is, so to speak- Hence they can reach out and contact the other, re-establishing communication.

Now, let us take this principle of 'Addresses' and nonsense and extend it slightly. Let us sat that the forum's server keeps a list of the 'addresses' of all the people who visit and passes it on to all the visitors. This would allow you, theoretically, to contact anybody on the forum despite session location. Once you move sessions, you'd need to contact the forum again to update your position on the 'list', but otherwise you'd maintain that large list of contacts.

...Did any of that make any sense at all, or should I try making diagrams?

[bryoSynthesis]

It all makes sense to me! Actually awesomely thought out.

[timelyTurnabout]

All cool indeed. It might be worthwhile explaining how one goes about procuring an "invite", so everyone can work that into their character's histories.

[lucidChthonia]

Okay, this is basically the gist of the timetrav tunnels:

The coders on the original founder team wanted a way to uniquely identify people and ensure that all connections to the server were linear (although not necessarily with the same rate of time). So they basically grabbed the timetrav encryption off the chat clients generally distributed in post-scratch universes (the ones with the timeframe features? yeah those). They also figured out how to take a checksum of someone's shiny from the few existing walkthroughs about hacking. Then they wrapped all this up in a little physical dongle, on the microscale, designed to be injected inside the body (woooo cyborgs) so that it stays with the player between sessions.

Hold a magnet near your skin and you can find and captchalogue the small dongle in case you need to replicate it. It basically surveys your Shiny and everything that is inside it, obfuscates most of the values (titles, aspects, and moons are the only values that are left for everyone to read), and sends that to sburb.org whenever you request logon. You have to have your shiny not be appreciably different in order to log on, so if you need Serious Therapy (whether Heart player or Mind player or otherwise) you will need to clear your new shiny with the mods/admins to be able to log on again. As a side-effect, if you lose the dongle you can get a new one and put it in without registering again. That is very convenient.

As a second side-effect, if you've accidentally been Shiny'd by a Heart player who's gone nuts, you won't be allowed on. This may be good or bad depending on the situation. (Although you can still register a new account saying "I can't get onto my old account" or something. Nobody'll believe you, but you can still do that.)

The dongle also contains the full code for the actual timetrav encryption browser needed to access SBURB.org if that is not already a thing you have. Y'know, just in case. This browser is technically what is referred to as "timetrav tunnel" - technically the dongle is the second factor in two-factor authentication - but the two terms merged almost immediately and they've never quite stopped being a thing since.

It is possible to construct the tunnel and dongle manually; there are alchemization instructions and you can use a larger-scale computer like wristwatch instead of the injectable if the concept freaks you out (at least temporarily; you'll lose it between sessions if it is outside of you). You just load a lot of surprisingly well-commented ~ATH into a dedicated wearable computer, load a different set of ~ATH for the actual browser onto your normal computers, and register for your login tunnel. It defaults to a random timestamp, but you are strongly recommended to pick the same timestamp as your friends so you can swap stories together.

The instructions are mirrored throughout the Furthest Ring. However, the entire installation process tends to freak people out and it's usually veterans that end up helping others with the timetrav tunnel business.

Note that the physical bit inside your body is very difficult to break. In fact the damn thing is as good at sticking around as the pendant's chain, which is unsurprising because it is alchemized from the pendant chain. You're not going to be able to break it for anything, trust me. The player's body is less durable than the damn thing. You can even hook up an optional thing that automatically reports to your co-players if you suffered a death, it's just that the admins don't support that kind of modding.

Yeah, probably more detail than you wanted or needed, but...

[timelyTurnabout]

That was approximately three more arbitrons of awesome than I was expecting. Questions:

1) is this all posted in character?
2) So, people can only get on to sburb.org if they are given a dongle, or given instructions on how to build one (and the relevant code)?

[lucidChthonia]

1) Sure! LC knows, most of the ICly mods know too, some veterans can do it.

2) Yep. The instructions are on a bunch of other public servers though.