Recently in Software Category

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…

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.

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.

I've got a small problem in creating the website for Avarthrel, and it seems that I have to give up finding a boxed solution for it. I probably sound like a broken record when I ramble about this, but the thing is, I have to give up, admit that the quest is hopeless, and just write the whole darn thing myself when I have time. It's a lot of work, and until it's finished the site will look like junk, but there seems to be no other, elegant way.

Basically, updating the website isn't exactly easy as it stands. I have a very specific set of requirements: either use static source files (to allow Subversion revisioning) or built-in versioning, allow arbitrary HTML snippets in more or less curious places some systems just don't anticipate (for forms, random links in sidebar, etc), support metadata for source documents, etc, etc... some are so-close-yet-so-far (Apache Lenya is a good system, but making it do what I want as far as custom outlook goes needs a lot of work, and as far 2.0 goes, creating static HTML output means hand-tidying up a dump from wget, it seems), some others just sound like they'd be repeat of what I did here.

So, I'll just scrap the idea of rebuilding the site in some neat software package and do it myself. I have to focus on the content and rebuild some of the ugliest parts of this site's infrastructure... One day, we may even have subdirectories and stuff!

When I first started the internal wiki, it used Instiki, which had one good feature at the time: The whole wiki could be exported to HTML or Textile format with a few clicks. Good, because an upgrade broke the thing.

I'd definitely want to produce a static version of the wiki for the Avarthrel website one day... but right now, I'm looking at various MediaWiki dumping tools, and I seem to be - somehow - not getting anywhere. The obvious choice would be the Collection extension, but it doesn't seem to work too well for me (I'm getting some weird database errors - people, all the world isn't MySQL...)

But just how hard can it be to produce one stinking HTML dump from a website?

Okay - I seem to be making progress. I found DumpHTML. There is hope! Perhaps one day, you'll get a static copy of the site!

UPDATE:
% php5 dumpHTML.php 
DB connection error: No database connection
zsh: segmentation fault  php5 dumpHTML.php

Never before in my illustrious programming life have I experienced PHP interpreter segfault. Oh well, maybe there's a way to get this thing to work...

I was wondering why the hell the rebuild was so fast. Well, turns out Movable Type 4.2 upgrade (with templates reset) completely messed up my archiving. Old blog posts are still there - they just don't get linked archived. What the hell?

Trying to resolve this somehow.

UPDATE: Fixed now. For some reason, the forum had it that I needed to open entry templates and save them. The world is a weird place.

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... =)