July 2008 Archives

Okay, people may think that in credible fantasy tales, you simply don’t commit a random faux pas along the lines of actually publishing RPG character sheets / stat blocks for the characters.

Let me say that a) I don’t particularly mind that practice at all, and b) the following stats have absolutely nothing to do with writing or preparing stories of any kind. I will not roll dice when writing stuff. I made these just for fun. =)

It seems that the stories I submitted have been accepted by Elfwood mods... you can read them right here in my user page. Very nice! I've actually gotten some comments about the stories! This doesn't happen too often - nobody comments on my stories in deviantART, for example. Wow. This is really cool.

Okay, a quick note. (Again, because apparently you can't post stuff using elinks, Movable Type wants blood.)

A few days ago, I posted a new story titled When Compassion Calls. I've never really written and published a story I was happy with in just a few days... or maybe this marks the return to the "stories I'll deepy regret about" later. I sure hope not. Well, the story is out there in the web page, deviantART...

...and I hope, in some time, in Elfwood, but that depends on the approvers. I also sent Carnival Wolves at the same time. Let's hope for the best...

The first Avarthrel game that I know of is called A Tale of a Missing Ball. It was a short text adventure / interactive fiction game that I made when getting some grips of Inform 7 interactive fiction authoring system.

Creating the game has been a fascinating experience. Inform 7 is probably right up there with Ruby among the "programming languages that are actually fun to develop stuff with". I may make Release 2 later on, just to make the game a bit more interesting and better written; now, I just wanted to let it go for a while and, maybe, let people say what they want about it.

The irony is, I can play the game in the GNOME Inform 7 development system, but damn if there's an actually working interpreter out there that works in Linux - the game is in blorbed Glulx format, and as such, finding an actually working interpreter is hard and building it from source is damn near impossible. And I'm not running open source software through Wine if there's allegations flying around that there might be a piece of software that actually, like, works.

Due to the fact my web host was slow adopting PHP5, and I had to use old junk, I originaly developed a simple, YAML-based comment script in Ruby for my furry stuff site and Avarthrel site. Then, I decided to reimplement part of it in PHP, to integrate better with my Smarty-based site. I don't particularly care about PHP, but it seems to be a language that the webhost supports very best, so here it is...

And now, thanks to the fact that the webhost supports PHP5 (and Spyc, the PHP YAML library, seems to be both very buggy and stalled in its tracks), I've reimplemented the comment script completely in PHP, this time using SQLite as the comment storage backend. What does this mean? Well, it means... uh... well, the site is less ugly on the code side. Basically, originally, my story publication cycle was as follows:

1. Create Smarty and PDF versions of the story. (story.sdoc, story.pdf)
   
2. Copy over a .phtml file and edit it to show the Smarty document. (story.phtml)
3. Copy over a comment posting script and edit it. (story-comment.cgi)
4. Call the script - this will create the YAML storage for the comments and static HTML comment snippet. These will be updated when comments are posted. (cottler/story.yml, cottler/story.html)
   

Then, the publication cycle was as follows, after I half-PHP'd it:

1. Create Smarty and PDF versions of the story. (story.sdoc, story.pdf)
   
2. Copy over a .phtml file and edit it to show the Smarty document. (story.phtml)
3. Copy over a comment posting script and edit it. (story-comment.cgi)
4. Call the script. The YAML file will be used to store the comments, and Smarty will automagically display the contents of this file in HTML form when document is read. (cottler/story.yml)
   

Now, it is...

1. Create Smarty and PDF versions of the story. (story.sdoc, story.pdf)
   
2. Copy over a .phtml file and edit it to show the Smarty document. (story.phtml)
3. Add an entry for this particular in the database. One PHP script is used to post comments. Comments will be taken from the database when the page is read.

Much simpler. =)

Another addition to the site is on the front page. I have long used SimplePie for showing news at various parts of my website. Now I simply grab the latest headlines from this blog's Atom feed and put them on the Avarthrel front page. The site just keeps getting more interesting... =)

Today, I experimented a little bit with MediaWiki stuff, and found out it's not easy - but possible and still reasonably straightforward - to add new page operations (or Monobook skin "tabs") to the pages.

I was kind of inspired by the Star Wars Databank site which used to have separate tabs for normal information, Expanded Universe and Behind the Scenes (nowadays they seem to have lumped all of the texts in the same page). So, instead of just Page and Talk, I now have Page, Talk, and Design notes. I'm considering an additional namespace for Sources (and I need to find a way to analyse my texts for factoids to use as sources), but I'm pretty sure cite.php would not like that stuff the least (and, by the way, I installed cite.php today too. =)

Well, brand new world of making notes that actually make sense may be ahead!