Slashdot Mirror

Gobby or MoonEdit

have you tried Moonedit? http://moonedit.com/indexen.htm

Writely's real-time collaboration, in my opinion, leaves something to be desired.

I'm used to using MoonEdit, which, while only a text editor, is a fully collaborative one. You see the letters appear the instant they are typed, unlike with Writely which seems to update chunks of paragraph every thirty seconds or so.

And MoonEdit puts each contributor's typing in a different color, so you can easily tell at a glance what's yours and what's theirs.

It's probably not the sort of "collaboration software" that the blog entry talks about, but a group of writers from the RP Congress City of Heroes roleplaying/writing circle have found that the server-based collaborative editor MoonEdit can work better than email for the small, specialized uses of writing stories together. We can write and edit them together in real time, with characters immediately responding to each other, rather than trying to guess at what the other characters would say and emailing the stuff back and forth.

I'm a member of a MMORPG RP/writing collective, the RP Congress on the Pinnacle City of Heroes server. It's pretty fun, and I don't have all that hard of a time with it. The other people in the group are great RPers and writers; we even manage to write stories and chat together out-of-game by using MoonEdit.

The thing about in-game RP is that you're limited by and large to text chat only. There are a few emotes--special animations that your character can go through, like waving, dancing, or gesturing imperiously, but they're so generic that they by and large do not enhance the experience. You can use Ventrilo and Teamspeak and Skype and the like for voice communication RPing (and there's one person in our play group who does a hilarious voice for his character) but that only goes so far--especially if you have a habit of playing alternate-gender characters.

One of the things the article didn't really go into is that story-writing can patch over some of the holes, things you can't do on-line, like having two characters played by the same person meet, converse, and adventure together. That's one of the biggest reasons for doing it, in fact.

Of course, even before this I was no stranger to text-based RP. A group of friends and I have been RP'ing via a chatserver--which had no pictures or images at all. Compared to that, text-based RP with images and actions is a walk in the park. :)

So they'd be using something like Multiplayer Notepad?

moonedit is what I've been using instead of subethaedit when I've wanted to do collaborative editing with those poor souls who have Macs. It's closed-source, Windows/Linux x86 only, is a terrible editor, the UI is horrible and it's generally a pain to use in comparison to subetha which Just Works, but it's a lot better than nothing.

I assume another possible alternative is to try using the crazy emacs mode where it can connect to multiple displays.