Mission to acquire nREPL server

Need to fit this in with an in-game explanation

Milestone changed to %beta-2

Milestone changed to %wishlist

I think for fourth-wall-piercing things the in-game explanation almost has to start with «a small religion worshiping the greatness of the cosmos»

In this case, they could try to «let the hand of the Universe to guide» by listening to cosmic microwave background and trying to decipher ship control commands out of that signal. They also allow the ship transponder to send their words and basic telemetry on the same frequency. Curiously enough, sometimes that does lead to events that look almost reasonable (filtering dangerous and meaningless sequences out of random noise has to do that sometimes). The player can buy and install a device for CMB «communication» that seems to be compatible with the player's ship.

How far in the game is that all expected to happen (depending on that I can try to write an explanation how the player stumbled upon this religion and decided to try)?

So far I've been thinking of the nREPL server as purely a convenience thing without any connections to the rest of the plot, so I'd say this could go pretty much anywhere.

mentioned in merge request !46

I'm actually somewhat less interested in the nrepl stuff now that the editor has gotten a lot better; I'm doing almost all of my hacking on the game from within the game itself.

Well, I could replace the nREPL with just sending a message from outside. I think for newbies host_fs is complicated — we have seen issues about locating the directory and how it changes if you move from a release to a checkout. And some simple way of importing text from outside and exporting it back would still be useful, if only to be able to meaningfully discuss their situation on IRC. Also, symlinks in Windows are complicated, so accessing host_fs can be annoying even after you have located it.

nREPL is a complicated overkill in this case, but listening on some port and allowing nc 127.0.0.1 12345 or love /path/to/bussard --send 12345 file-to-send.txt could be nice. Should I change !46 in this direction?

Note that I want Void for three reasons: communication with external world, flight-testing ground, and a plot hook for the late-game events.

closed