Stuff What I Posted

Imaginary Realities volume 7, issue 3 is out!

2015-07-28T10:07:00.001+12:00

The latest issue of Imaginary Realities is now available for reading. Volume 7, issue 3.

It features the following articles:

A text MUD with a working ecology system
Dispelling the gloom
How integral are letters and text to ASCII gaming?
Legend and the lore
The bonds of mudding
The mercurial temperament at the end of the world
Where do I begin?

With one article related to roguelikes, another to interactive fiction and the rest to mudding, it should provide our most diverse collection yet.

PDF and EPUB e-books are not currently available. The new website generation creates these automatically, rather than manually as they were made before. But unfortunately, getting them to look nice enough to be worth distributing requires a little more work. They'll be added back to the website before (or with) the next issue hopefully.

Announcements have been made on:

Twitter.
Reddit: /r/roguelikes, /r/roguelikedev, /r/mud, /r/interactivefiction.
Forums: MUDBytes, Top Mud Sites, The MUD Connector, intfiction.org.

Enjoy!

Imaginary Realities website updated!

2015-06-12T10:19:00.002+12:00

I've finally found the time to give the Imaginary Realities website a more updated look. The main change is that it's now generated by Jinja2, a Python templating library which I'd thoroughly recommend. It made everything simple, up to and including picking out and including the featured article.

There's always more to do. The next steps are likely to be taking advantage of the Reddit and Disqus Python APIs to make discussion of articles more readily discovered.

There's a whole lot of shenanigans with Disqus and something I think they call "Discover." At first you could opt out of it showing on your website, now you can kind of opt out of having your own posts discoverable. It's unclear whether this means that you will one day wake up and find giant rows of thumbnails of various trashy thumbnails and links to "top 10 celebrities who benefited from an all cabbage diet" and so forth. I googled for ages trying to work this out, and they don't seem to appear at the moment, so fingers crossed. The license for this site is Creative Commons non-commercial, so we'd have to look for a Disqus replacement if this started happening.

Imaginary Realities article submission deadline reached

2015-06-02T19:41:00.000+12:00

With the start of June, and coincidentally with it the start of Winter, we have passed the article submission deadline for the next issue. Seven articles have been submitted, and are in the hands of the editors and proofers, for them to work their magic.

A loose deadline for publication is set for the end of the month, specifically July 1st. But this of course requires the publication process to run its course. Once the editing and proofing is done, then a draft version of the site will be put together by myself, and provided for authors and editors/proofers to give the thumbs up. And at that point, the new issue will go live and will be announced. There may be some delay, if things take longer and require a little extra time to get things done.

We will be replacing the Imaginary Realities subreddit with Disqus comment sections at the bottom of articles, unless something goes wrong. The framework is in place for this to be done, it just requires the articles to be published for it to come into place.

Write an article for the next issue of Imaginary Realities

2015-05-02T11:33:00.000+12:00

Are you involved with text-based gaming? If so, whether your involvement is in mudding, roguelikes, interactive fiction, gamebooks, browser games or maybe even something else, please consider writing an article for Imaginary Realities.

Imaginary Realities is an online journal which first ran from September 1998 to December 2001, originally focused on mudding. It has been revived, and had published a new issue just recently, which you can find here:

http://journal.imaginary-realities.com/volume-07/issue-02/

Find more details about suitable article topics here:

http://journal.imaginary-realities.com/volume-07/issue-02/request-for-content/index.html

Please email me before writing an article, to confirm that the topic you are interested in writing about, is both suitable and within our range of coverage at this email address:

richard.m.tew@gmail.com

Articles should be in the range of 1000-4000 words, and need to be received by May 31st, 2015. Longer articles are possible for serialisation, with approval required.

Imaginary Realities, volume 7, issue 2 released

2015-04-13T07:04:00.000+12:00

Get Imaginary Realities volume 7, issue 2, at the usual place.

Bartering
Is Structuralism a Viable Critical Lens for Roguelike Games?

Write an article for Imaginary Realities

2015-01-28T17:14:00.001+13:00

Imaginary Realities is an online journal which originally ran from September 1998 to December 2001, primarily focused on mudding. It has been revived, and had published a new issue just recently, which you can find here:

http://journal.imaginary-realities.com/volume-07/issue-01/

If you’re interested in the older issues, you can also find them here:

http://imaginary-realities.disinterest.org

Find more details about suitable article topics here:

http://journal.imaginary-realities.com/volume-06/issue-01/request-for-content/index.html

Please email me before writing an article, to confirm that the topic you are interested in writing about, is both suitable and within our range of coverage at this email address:

richard.m.tew@gmail.com

Articles should be in the range of 1000-4000 words, and need to be received by February 28th, 2015. Longer articles are possible for serialisation, with approval required.

Imaginary Realities, volume 7, issue 1 released

2015-01-25T21:26:00.002+13:00

Get Imaginary Realities volume 7, issue 1, at the usual place.

Choosing an Emoting System
The Dungeon Keeper
What Do I Do Now?
The Worlds in Which We Wander

Write an article for Imaginary Realities volume 6, issue 2

2014-04-21T11:39:00.000+12:00

Are you involved with text-based gaming? If so, whether your involvement is in mudding, roguelikes, interactive fiction, gamebooks, browser games or maybe even something else, please consider writing an article for Imaginary Realities.

Imaginary Realities is an online journal which originally ran from September 1998 to December 2001, primarily focused on mudding. It has been revived, and had published a new issue just recently, which you can find here:

http://journal.imaginary-realities.com/volume-06/issue-01/

If you’re interested in the older issues, you can also find them here:

http://imaginary-realities.disinterest.org

Find more details about suitable article topics here:

http://journal.imaginary-realities.com/volume-06/issue-01/request-for-content/index.html

Please email me before writing an article, to confirm that the topic you are interested in writing about, is both suitable and within our range of coverage at this email address:

richard.m.tew@gmail.com

Articles should be in the range of 1000-4000 words, and need to be received by May 31st, 2014. Longer articles are possible for serialisation, with approval required.

Imaginary Realities, volume 6, issue 1 released

2014-04-06T20:23:00.001+12:00

Get Imaginary Realities volume 6, issue 1, at the usual place.

I should really paste the table of contents here, but publishing this is so involved I have used up today's quota of willpower.

Imaginary Realities volume 6, issue 1 update

2014-02-08T12:01:00.001+13:00

Just a quick update on the progress with the next issue of Imaginary Realities. The deadline for article submissions was at the end of January, and we have five submitted articles awaiting editing. Once the editing is complete, they will be published in much the same format as the last issue. I'm hoping to publish at the start of March.

If you're someone who does that twitter thing, you can follow us at @irjrnl.

Roguelike MUD progress #7 - Web-based client

2014-01-29T11:04:00.000+13:00

Previous post: Roguelike MUD progress #6

I set a mini-goal for myself, to display a curses-based program on a web page.

The first step was to find a no frills, easy to adopt and extend Python websocket solution. One I've stumbled on few times, is the simple websockets client/server gist. I used a slightly fixed version of it as a base. The next step was to find decent web-based terminal emulation. There are frameworks available which ditch the terminal window, but they come with larger problems. The best candidate is term.js.

So taking the simple websockets simple_websocket_client.html and adding term.js, then modifying simple_websocket_server.py, it was easy to get a simple echo working with embedded ANSI control sequences.

First, I tried to proxy the input and output from the nano editor. Unfortunately, doing this with the subprocess module resulted in nano outputting a message about not supporting redirection. There's probably a way to do this, but too much bother and it is not really my goal anyway.

Next, I went for something simpler. I did a simple proxying of input and output to a telnet connection. Specifically my Roguelike MUD codebase. There were some teething problems. Text incoming from the browser-based terminal through the websocket, is UTF-8 encoded. And similarly, outgoing text has to be as well. But responses from the MUD contain both ANSI escape sequences and telnet negotiation sequences. In order to work around this, I stripped the telnet negotiation out of outgoing text, and modified the relatively basic websocket code to also send binary frames.

A working connection:

In-game display:

As the picture above shows, the ANSI sequences are working perfectly. But the character set does not seem to contain the line drawing characters. My game interface already has debugging tools which display accessible character sets.

The main character sets:

As can be seen above, the only character set with even a hint of line drawing characters, is the one exposed through the ESC(0 ANSI sequence. Most of these sequences are faked by term.js, where known character sets are mocked up from the underlying unicode-supporting font.

One solution is to do what I do with Putty, which is to identify the connected client, and if it's one which supports unicode, then switch unicode on using terminal control sequences. Modifying term.js to respond to the ENQ character (0x05), and send it's terminal name (xterm) was easy enough.

This is what I should be seeing now:

This is what I am actually seeing:

The correct unicode characters are being sent, but not being displayed correctly by term.js. I don't expect this will be that difficult to correct when I get some more time to work on this.

Imaginary Realities article deadline approaching

2014-01-25T13:38:00.000+13:00

The article submission deadline is at the end of January, or around six days away. If you're working on an article, keep this in mind. If you still wish to work on an article, and can get it done in time, please get in touch.

We've already received two articles of around six offered. Unfortunately, there wasn't as many articles offered this time around, but if the rest of the articles pan out we should have enough for a reasonably sized issue.

Write an article for Imaginary Realities

2014-01-10T20:55:00.000+13:00

There's still another 21 days until the submission deadline. If you've thought of writing an article please email me. Details are available in the previous blog post on this subject.

Write an article for Imaginary Realities, volume 6, issue 1

2013-12-20T11:54:00.000+13:00

http://journal.imaginary-realities.com/volume-05/issue-01/

If you’re interested in the older issues, you can also find them here:

http://imaginary-realities.disinterest.org

Find more details about suitable article topics here:

http://journal.imaginary-realities.com/volume-05/issue-01/request-for-content/index.html

Please email me before writing an article, to confirm that the topic you are interested in writing about, is both suitable and within our range of coverage at this email address:

richard.m.tew@gmail.com

Articles should be in the range of 1000-4000 words, and need to be received by January 31st, 2014. Longer articles are possible for serialisation, with approval required.

Imaginary Realities volume 5, issue 1 released

2013-12-16T15:39:00.000+13:00

Imaginary Realities volume 5, issue 1, is now available for offline and online viewing at:

journal.imaginary-realities.com

It is downloadable in EPUB and PDF formats, for those with e-reader devices or e-book applications on their fancy modern doodackys.

Imaginary Realities update

2013-12-10T12:25:00.002+13:00

Despite the one month delay, Imaginary Realities volume 5, issue 1, is due to be released in three days on December 13th. You will be able to find it at the following address:

journal.imaginary-realities.com

It will also be downloadable in EPUB and PDF formats, for those with e-reader devices or e-book applications on their fancy modern doodackys.

Imaginary Realities update

2013-11-15T08:29:00.001+13:00

The other editors and I have decided to delay the release for perhaps a week or two. The articles are looking great, and are all edited and proofread. As this is the first issue, we want to make sure it is done right.

Imaginary Realities update

2013-11-12T11:30:00.000+13:00

The first issue is looking pretty good. It's almost ready for publication, but there's a slight hitch. We realised that we needed to get the article authors to formally license their articles so we can actually use them. The lack of any real licensing for articles in the original Imaginary Realities issues, has meant that the copyright situation is confused. We need to get this right from the start.

In the best case, all authors will respond and license their articles suitably, and the not too bad looking EPUB e-book will be published on time. As will the okay looking PDF, and the superbly retro-looking web site. In the worst case, we may either have a two or three days delay in publication, or that delay and a few less articles.

If you submitted an article and are reading this, please reply to my email. If you didn't get an email, please email me immediately, or check all the email addresses you've used to contact us.

Thanks!

Imaginary Realities update

2013-10-22T11:43:00.003+13:00

Around 7 articles were submitted before the submission deadline passed. They are in the hands of the editors, and once they're done, I'll prepare the published formats which will be released on November 13th.

Imaginary Realities submission deadline

2013-10-03T16:32:00.002+13:00

If you want to get your article in for the November issue of Imaginary Realities (volume 5, issue 1), you have 10 days left. If you did not run your article idea by me, and are working on an article, then please do so to ensure you're not wasting your time. The next issue will be published in February 2014, so you can always submit your article for that. But keep in mind the plan previously discussed by the various interested people was to expand the focus to other forms of text games, like interactive fiction, roguelikes and some other weird shit I've never used myself. February 2014 is a long time away!

Imaginary Realities update #1

2013-08-21T10:14:00.000+12:00

The first article has been submitted, coming in at 7000 words. There are also loosely 14 articles "promised" by various authors on a range of subjects. I quote promised because this is a volunteer effort, and while we now can't come in at 0 for 14, we could of course come in at 1 for 14.

Interested in writing an article? Get in touch at:

imaginary-realities-editors@disinterest.org

Write something for Imaginary Realities

2013-08-14T12:44:00.003+12:00

Imaginary Realities is a journal which was regularly published about 12 years ago, with articles on the subject of MUDs. A new issue is being published with an article deadline of October 13th. If you would like to write an article for it, or know someone I should talk to who would, please email me.

If you don't have any fixed idea of what to write and would like some suggestions, please email me. Even if you have a fixed idea, email me and we'll make sure it's suitable.

Here are some ideas based on community suggestions:

Annotated logs of you playing a MUD, basically you commenting as you play a MUD.

Codebase licensing, known criminals and whether it matters.

A non-advertisement article describing your MUD, perhaps you play it, perhaps you work on it.

An article on what MUDs are missing from a player perspective.

Religion and mudding, are there religious MUDs? How popular are they? What are the problems with MUDs given your religion?

A tutorial, or one article in a series in a tutorial, on how to create a MUD using your code base.

Documenting MUD standards. The standard sets of commands expected in MUDs. Standard syntax used for commands. Standard features that modern muds should have. Articles on the subject of helping people making MUDs make them more approachable to players.

The state of ROM/Diku/LP driver development and where it's headed in the future.

About MUDs where you can buy stuff with real money.

Where did Maiden Desmodus come from, who wrote it, how well did it go, did it make money, is it still around in any form that matters and lessons learned.

Web sockets and MUD development.

The future relevance of telnet.

A guide to making a MUD more accessible to the blind, deaf and other alternately sense gifted or whatever the politically correct term of the day is.

Revisiting old articles from the earlier years of Imaginary Realities, and covering either their relevance today, seeing where the state of the art is or basically anything using them as inspiration.

And so on. It's up to you, get in contact.

Planet MUDDev notification

2013-04-23T15:03:00.000+12:00

You may receive some duplicate Planet MUDDev blog entries. This may happen when the hosting provider switches from Bluehost to Hostmonster in the next couple of days. The same software is running on the new host, and it is configured the same way, and will be available from the same address. So it should transition seamlessly, but open source price gives open source quality! :-)

The reason for the switch is that I will be moving to a location without internet access, and my existing domain name hosting was to expire on the 2nd of May. The joy of switching hosting providers and domain name registrars in preparation for this, is described here: hmmmmmmmmmmm.

Also, for those who have read this far, there should be a new Planet RoguelikeDev appearing when the switch is complete. This is intended to contain the same sort of content as Planet MUDDev, namely posts covering the process of developing a roguelike. I would have made the link work right away, but the joy of switching hosting providers and domain name registrars prevents me from doing so.

OpenCyc experimentation

2013-02-16T21:41:00.000+13:00

Last December, OpenCyc 4.0 was released. I've been meaning to get more familiar with OpenCyc for a long time, and luckily this release adds a lot of interface improvements.

The search bar now has a drop down set of auto-complete matches.
The display for a selected term is cleaner and easier to use.
Terms have a popup menu that allows easy editing or deletion.

Experiment

I was hoping to translate the D&D SRD ability modifier formula into a CycL function, so that I could at a later point calculate the modifier for the given attribute of an entity. The OpenCyc documentation was never extensive enough to describe how to do this sort of thing, and it has not been updated since the original 1.0 release. Add into that dead links, and working out how to use OpenCyc is pretty hard going.

A huge amount of browsing terms in the OpenCyc ontology browser led me to the simple formula:

(#$TruncateFn (#$QuotientFn (#$DifferenceFn ?SCORE 10) 2))

And that's ignoring that I had trouble finding DifferenceFn and QuotientFn, originally using PlusFn and TimesFn in their places.

In order to test an expression like this, it needs to be wrapped in evaluate, which binds the result to a variable allowing it to be seen in the query page.

(#$evaluate ?RESULT (#$TruncateFn (#$QuotientFn (#$DifferenceFn ?SCORE 10) 2)))

Like a SELECT statement in SQL, this effectively displays one row with one column named RESULT showing the value of 3.

Defining the standard terms for a CycL function is pretty simple.

The first step is to create a term (a generic step) with the name of the function, in this case #$AbilityScoreModifierFn. In the top frame, there is a tools link on the right hand side. Click on this, and then select Create Term.

Next various properties are asserted for the term. In the top frame, there is a Assert link. Click on this, and then simply enter the relevant expressions and assert each in turn.

(#$isa #$AbilityScoreModifierFn #$UnaryFunction)
(#$arity #$AbilityScoreModifierFn 1)
(#$arg1Isa #$AbilityScoreModifierFn #$Integer)
(#$resultIsa #$AbilityScoreModifierFn #$Integer)

And finally the remaining task, is to associate the formula with the AbilityScoreModifierFn function. I've come to the conclusion that this actually isn't possible to do from within CycL.

There are two possible ways of associating logic with a term (that I've been able to find).

rewriteOf
evaluationDefn

With rewriteOf, you might assert something like:

(#$rewriteOf #$AbilityScoreModifierFn
  (#$Lambda (?SCORE) (#$TruncateFn (#$QuotientFn (#$DifferenceFn ?SCORE 10) 2))))

Unfortunately, rewriteOf expects a reifiable function as it's second argument. What this means, is that what this does is assert (#$AbilityScoreModifierFn 18) as a fact in the ontology. This is obviously not what I want, which is simply calculate and output a value, with no side-effects.

CycL expressions cannot be associated with evaluationDefn. This is intended rather to simply specify the name of a function in the lower level lisp language, called SubL. These are apparently easy enough to define, but it has been hard enough getting to this point, let along adding further complication outside of the ontology.

Experiment conclusion

At this point, I get the feeling it isn't intended that you can directly create formulas as expressions within CycL. Instead, I assume that it is expected that these are defined in SubL.

Ontology thoughts

I'm also not entirely sure that the effort of using OpenCyc is worth it. While there is a wealth of knowledge in the ontology, it doesn't seem deep enough in the right places to be used to back a game experience.

There are definitions for Crossbow and Longbow for instance, but they don't have the depth which there is for Gun. Gun has logic to define information about its projectiles, and defines the parts that make up both guns and their projectiles. But there is no corresponding breakdown of the parts of a bow, or the projectile which a bow fires.

The humanoid body has parts, but there is no definition of how the parts join together. Actually, that's not entirely true. I believe there are a few definitions of which rib comes before the next, but little more. Torso doesn't seem to be joined to arms, neck and legs or whatever it should be joined to. Of course, cutting up corpses is not a crucial MUD feature, but I believe this is illustrative of a general lack of depth where it counts.

OpenCyc thoughts

Do you know how much memory OpenCyc requires to run out of the box? A minimum of 5 gigabytes. Who wants to run a MUD and to have to run a second process which they connect to via SOAP, which uses this much memory? And who wants to write their own SOAP encoding of their queries and other commands directed at the OpenCyc process, because there are only Java bindings provided?

At this point I am wondering if there is any reason to bother experimenting further.

pysrd

2013-02-04T18:46:00.001+13:00

One of my long-term projects is to programmatically generate game logic from the D&D 3.5 SRD. The idea is that ideally if the required legwork was done, any time I wanted to prototype something around a game experience, it should be possible to plug in the processed data and be 98% of the way to having stock D&D gameplay. There's a lot of hand-waving there around the phrase "required legwork", but that's not really important for the purpose of this post.

I've extracted the low level scripts I use to both extend the database and introspect it's contents, and published them on github under the project name pysrd.

The SRD is available from Wizards of the Coast as a set of RTF documents. This of course, is not ideal, but fortunately it is possible to get the data from andargor.com in different database formats, including SQLite. Unfortunately however, not all SRD data is included in these databases. Fortunately, the OpenSRD project includes generated HTML versions of the RTF documents, which can more easily be processed.