Avarthrel Blog

Failure to communicate, part 1: I just re-re-re-etc-submitted The Sweet Side of Death to Elfwood - okay, so I was not reading all of the instructions regarding image credits. I hope the thing will be published there, too, one day. I really do.

Failure to communicate, part 2: Tested the Avarthrel website in Opera, seems to be fine. Tested it in Midori (webkit-based browser), seems good. Yet: Tested it in proto-ancient version of Safari and lo! it blew up. Tested it in Internet Explorer 6 and words fail me. CSS sure is hard! I have no idea how the website works in IE7, but I sure hope it does better than it does in IE6. Regrettably, I'm not able to test the site too well in IE7 and I don't have the energy or inclination to make any hacks to support the bloody thing either. I can only really test it actively on Iceweasel/Firefox anyway... so here we go, I just went and added a Firefox download button on the page. =)

I just added some jQuery-based leet graphical effects to the Avarthrel website - now you can show or hide the comment form with neat effects and all. No changes to the comment scripts themselves though.

I've come to the conclusion that for some reason, writing stuff with Emacs + LaTeX doesn't work as well as it should. I guess that my quest for ultimate word processor seems to be forever ongoing... I really hope things will change when we get more semantics in OpenDocument format (and OpenOffice.org UI) and I'll be able to find motivation to write a bit better and less hacky pieces of software to support the workflow.

I've almost made progress in trying to decipher the utter lunacy that is OpenOffice.org Basic. One day, this modify-stuff-for-draft-printouts script of mine will actually work!

Thanks to sitting by OpenOffice.org once again, I've actually written some new stuff lately. I hope it will turn out to be something. It's got to be something eventually, right?

GtkRadiant could very well be the next big thing in my story development toolbox.

I had problems making the story I’m currently working on a bit more interesting. Faira and Lex are busy robbing the Blannyr manor, which, according to the story, has, er, a kitchen, a few hallways, a hall and a giant ballroom-come-treasure vault, described in the story as being 55 by 46 paces in size, which would make it a nice place to play a bit of indoor football if all the treasure would be cleared up.

But I was thinking… it’s all nice and proper to have this sort of place on paper, but what does it really look like? How does a 55-by-46-paces ballroom really look like, now that you really think of it?

The environment is boring in my mind because I’ve not put my visualisation of the story on paper. I have a vivid picture of the hall in my mind, and I wish I had the patience to draw the thing. Currently, all I can do is to give a description. It’s sad when I can only describe the actual locations where the story happens, when in an ideal world, I could describe every corner of the manor…

If there’s anything I’ve learned from Thief game series, it’s that fully-fleshed-out areas make stories engaging. If the mission involves robbing a house while the home owner is sleeping, you make a house where the guy is actually asleep. The player can fulfill the mission objectives (rob the house) and witness, first hand, that the story is actually true (the guy is sleeping).

So here I am, recreating the image I have of the Blannyr manor in my head… using GtkRadiant, and designing the manor as a level for the good old Quake. Perhaps, when the process is finished, I’ll be able to release the thing so people can play it. And, perhaps in distant future, I’ll be making The Dark Mod missions out of the stories, too, once that mod is released…

Well, it seems that the impossible is possible, and I managed to finish this particular phase of updating the Avarthrel website. A new look -- and a new logo, too!

Okay, I think I'm finally in proper condition to write something about the latest story.

But first, a few random comments on web design. Or, even before that, a few thoughts on fantasy art. I have some personal problems creating engaging fantasy art, and that's because fantasy art requires attention to detail. So, creating an interesting-looking web site for fantasy literature would require making artwork with a bunch of details.

Sorry for not being more thorough (my eyes are kind of sore right now), but here's a quick note: the story titled The Sweet Side of Death is, like, out there. Available in Avarthrel website and deviantART so far.

And now, I'll hijack my blog temporarily to rant about obsolete PHP solutions.

So, I tried to start up an Avarthrel forum. Good idea, right? Looks like the venerable giant of forum software, phpBB, has sqlite support in the brand-new release 3. There's a third-party widget that does OpenID. A well-known, widely supported forum software that appears to do everything I'll ever need - all good and nice, right?

Unpack, start up installation, and...

SQLite: Unavailable

Yeah. All the while my comment system runs pretty darn well on top of PHP and pdo_sqlite.

Meanwhile, phpbb3 installer does say MySQL is available, while referring to "mysqli" driver, which in this day and age should Die in a Fire Already, Dammit. Modern and Largely Rewritten (an allegation that has been flying around about phpBB 3) systems should use fascinating, new, non-headache-inducing database access layers like PDO - incidentally, this webhost doesn't support PHP sqlite module, but does support pdo_sqlite with all the proper seriousness.

$ grep -r 'PDO(' .
$

This so bodes well. NOT.

So sorry, no forums yet! As surprising as it may sound, not all webhosts throw MySQL support in for free, and I'm not paying for something that I won't find massive unprecedentedly popular use for...

Update: A little bit of research later it gets better! "sqlite" is sqlite 2.x, the ancient, the terrible! "pdo_sqlite" is sqlite 3.x, the new, the bold, the beautiful! ...please, phpBB folks, if you advertise "SQLite 2.8.2+", keep in mind that that does sort of imply on the first glance that SQLite 3.x is supported, no?

Yet another angsty update: The competition is even worse! I looked at NuclearBB, which apparently had an alpha release last year, the website doesn't seem to mention the system requirements, and the bug tracker can't accept reports from random passers-by, you've got to register and all, so I can't report the issue. I tried FluxBB, which says it supports SQLite, but the wiki page says "FluxBB 1.2.* has only been thoroughly tested on versions 2.8.11 and 2.8.14 of SQLite, but should work with basically any version." The web site, bless its heart, is a wiki, but I couldn't edit without logging in or whatever. Which is a damn shame, because I would have liked to point out that pdo_sqlite and thus sqlite3 doesn't bloody work here either.

*sigh* look, I'm generally against whining about things in blogs when I *should* be contacting people about these issues, but the thing is, it's too hard. How hard, really, it is to have an open forum or wiki for rather fundamental support issues like this? I know, I know: In closed-source world, the Big Faceless Companies answer the phone and say "we don't do that", but seriously, OSS people should do better than "we'd love to help you, just participate in this little blood pact ritual first. Open your mouth, say 'A'!"

Here's a short note for the purpose of Wondering Aloud. I wonder how hard it would be to manage canonical facts from stories using specialised software?

What I'm envisioning is some sort of an expert system, though I'm a little bit hesitant to use the current crop of languages that seem to be cropping up in the very cursory searches. They all seem to use rather complex forms of definition - yeah, sorry, it's 2008 and artificial intelligence is still hard. What I'm looking for would be some sort of a simple language to tie up entities to each other and specific events, dates and locations.

It would be quite simple to just read stories, and collect facts together. For example, one could read "The Carnival Wolves", and come up with...

"Frevelthan Athelevathan is a male elf. Thelivna Athelevathan is a female elf. Frevelthan Athelevathan and Thelivna Athelevathan are married and live in Lethlei-Yssrai-Carghven, a village in the duchy of Nothross, which is located in the kingdom of Furinel."

or,

"An autumn festival was held celebrating the liberation of the city of Nothross in 1.IX.630 AR ('first party since reclaiming Nothross, two years ago, celebrating autumn's coming'). Thelivna Athelevathan was among the attendees."

This sort of system would rule.

Thanks to PHP & SimpleXML, the main Avarthrel site now has a side bar with a site map. I just got a massive deja vu feeling - and yes, turns out it's not the first time I've written a side bar implementation. My Neverwinter Nights site had such a sidebar too, but it wasn't XML-based - it was raw included PHP4 code from... God knows when. Well, at least it still works. It appears I have utterly destroyed (save for the copies buried deep in Subversion) the Common Lisp -based madness.

As far as the Avarthrel website redesign goes, I've got to say I have a giant job ahead, because I'm not a Visual Guy. Yesterday, I told my friend that I have something specific in mind about the site's new design: "a bastard child of Thief: The Circle, T2X site, and Elfwood story pages". How interesting and original it turns out remains to be seen, but one thing is sure - it'll probably look much better than what's out there now.

Also, I started using rsync to push changes to the Avarthrel site. Since I have different configuration files for the development box and the webhost, and there's stuff I don't want on the webhost anyway (such as .svn directories), I can't push the files right on, and I've always used scp. But now, with a little bit of --exclude and --dry-run, it turns out updating stuff with rsync is actually pretty easy!