prog: (Volity)
I've been doing a lot of coding since the start of October, in three very different projects for three different customers. It's interesting. I will tell you know about one of them, which the most recent of these and the most interesting to me personally.

I finally got my hands dirty with sXBL last weekend, and after spending the last few evenings mashing at it I feel that I finally have the hang of it. All the magic about shadow trees and binding events and thus and such really took me a while to wrap my head around, but now I'm starting to make some stuff that sings, and I like it.

I am using it to start making that card game library I mentioned earlier The idea is that you, as a Volity game UI creator, will be able to write UI code that reads something like this: "Using this card artwork, draw the player's hand, with these dimensions, here. Draw the opponents' hands here and here, at half-size. Here's where a draw pile goes, and here is where cards are discarded. When this certain event happens please animate a card flying from the pile to the player's hand."

Much of that will be expressed as XML, using a custom tagset we will provide. And you won't have to write one line of Javascript about how to draw a hand, or sort its cards, or how to animate the flying cards. Just say where the things are, note their size and rotation, and mark when animation events should happen, and the library will take care of the rest. You can also add on as much additional SVG and Javascript as your game needs; this is just a programming library, and you use it as such.

I have started to create an importable SVG document that contains the sXBL templates for the handful of core card game objects I am envisioning. Once I've got its whole skeleton sketched out, I'll set something Subversiony up, and turn to the Volity community, whereupon I will lead this new and exciting little sub-project. I don't think I need to wait to do any of the animation, which will be the hardest part. We can work on that together.
prog: (Volity)
Thursday night I invited [livejournal.com profile] daerr over to help me eat pizza and brainstorm about Volity. But jmac, it was a Thursday night! You promised yourself not to think about Volity on the three "ITA days" you have scheduled every week! Ah, you are almost correct. I refuse to think about the business known as Volity Games between Wednesday and Friday, in exchange for ignoring ITA on the other days. But the open Volity project is fair game!

And it's been months since I have thought about the actual game technology, so consumed have I been with launching the moneymaking part of the business. As innovative as that is, working on it is still far more similar to any other sort of "e-commerce" (spew) web programming than anything that even remotely has to do with games.

Furthermore, as I have written, that's lonely work right now. I'm the only person putting a significant amount of effort into core Volity development these days and it's depressing. I hunger for a sense of parallel work again, and of leading something good. So, I shall aim to give the volity.org crank a few good turns and see if it can't keep itself going for a while.

There is a plan now, and it will take a little while to set up, but it will be Good and You Will Like It, and it will be fun for me in the meantime. The first thing that must occur is my grokkage of sXBL (spew, but only on that awful eTLA). WIth this, I shall sketch out the beginnings of something Volity's needed for years: a library for easier UI development. It won't be super-general: it will focus on 52-deck card games, inspired by how Clubhouse Games on the Nintendo DS does various things. But it will be elegant, reusable, and (I hope) popular and ultimately inspirational to others.

Once I have a skeletal version complete I shall turn to the community and encourage direct input, also setting up Subversion repositories and other goodies that we've already learned to take advantage of.

I'm really excited about this! And that means it will actually get done! It will be a good thing to work on during my four weekly "Volity days" when I am tired of slogging through payment system code (which I must also keep foremost in mind, yes).
prog: (coffee)
Zarf has finished all the trumps (major arcana) for his SVG tarot deck. PNG preview here.

Why don't I have any tarot-cardy icons? I guess because I'd have to pick one to start with.



Fact you may not have known about me: During my fifth and final year of college, and for a little ways after graduation, I was deeply involved in the cartomancy aspect of tarot, to the point where I believed that I experienced something mystical through it (and also to the point where, ten years later, I can still easily summon the word "cartomancy"). I was also under a tremendous amount of stress and confusion from various sources. No doubt these were linked, but I don't think the relationship of the two is merely symptomatic: screwing around with the cards helped me get through that rough time. Typical story of someone lonely employing religion, really.

I left it behind around the time I reconnected with friends, the people I think of as my Maine tribe, a couple of years after graduation. As things stabilized, I reƫvaluated my spiritual standing and found that the woo-woo was no longer part of it. The deck I used for all that, a Robin Wood Tarot I bought from Silo Seven in Bangor, was repurposed for a while as a Zarcana/Gnostica deck, but I eventually retired it in favor of the Aquarian Tarot's far more mellow and game-appropriate imagery.

I still have it, though, up on my game shelf, in its original, beat-up box. I don't regret going through that period, though for a long while before now I was hesitant to admit to it. Learning the tradition of tarot and all its elemental symbolism was a lot of fun, and I still enjoy seeing it used as a source of fantastic stories. (And I have long held a solid association between the four core Volity Games folks - [livejournal.com profile] prog, [livejournal.com profile] daerr, [livejournal.com profile] radiotelescope, [livejournal.com profile] jtroutman - and the four suit-elements. Though this sort of thinking was inspired as much by the comic The Invisibles as by anything else.)
prog: (what_you_say)
I just got an email from someone at Apple informing me that the MIME type used by the first SVG document I ever made is out of date. What the.

He was testing an upcoming Safari release's new SVG-rendering capabilities, but that's not the point. How the hell he found the document, that's the bigger issue. Are there so few SVG documents on the Web that that one will get pulled into a "let's see how this handles the real world" testing suite?

(I make no apologies for the catchphrase seen in the document. It was all the rage when I created it.)
prog: (Default)

Finally started working on the Fluxx UI in earnest. I ground out the above Keeper icons in about an hour after once again blowing the dust off Illustrator and trying to figure out how the hell the tools work. As usual, through blundering around and pecking at its (sadly kind of crappy) online docs, I did a decent job, and started figuring things out as I went. These are the simplest of the 18 Keeper designs I have in mind, and I may return to redo them once I've learned various things by making the next 14.

The thought bubble is supposed to be "Dreams", by the way. I hope that's obvious enough if you know that there's a Keeper with that name in the game, which is often paired with Sleep -- whose icon I hope is a bit more obvious.

Also pleased to see that Illustrator's SVG output isn't as insane as I thought it was. It's insane by default, but you can tell it to keep all its proprietary metadata out of the file and not embed any fonts or graphics, and (in the case of these graphics) that shrinks the file size from more than 250K to less than 4K. That adds up to many megs of savings in the final game SVG UI file, resulting in that much less work for the renderer to meditate upon before play.
prog: (zendo)
This week has been quite fun and productive so far. Swung back into the groove at work fairly well, and got back into Frivolity code hacking. Got the test suite, running on my laptop, to work locally, and again when pointed at the new volity.net Jabber server that [livejournal.com profile] daerr set up. Hope to post a bugfix release by this weekend, and then start in on the new stuff that K will need for his client to work correctly.

Good game night yesterday, for me. [livejournal.com profile] dougo suggested we play Currents, which I haven't tried in years. Playing with three highly critical game geeks resulted in many rule-change suggestions being collected, some of which I can't wait to try. One in particular makes me especially excited because it might let me do away with those lame Goaltending rules. The last time I worked on the game, I was puzzling about how to fix Goaltending; it didn't occur to me to just throw out the rule entirely, making the game simpler, which now strikes me as something to strive for. I like to think this is a reflection of my growth as a writer/programmer since then!

Also got to talk about Volity with this group for the first time, which was neat. (It was a natural segue, as playing Currents reminded me that it was one of the reasons I started to invent Volity -- I wanted to be able to rapidly create computer versions of new board game ideas, allowing me to test them out with both humans and bots.) I also got to show off my pure-SVG/ECMAScript rock-paper-scissors game (sorry, not on the Web yet, though it probably should be), running in Squiggle. Oh, and I learned to pronounce "Batik" correctly, since it hadn't occurred to me Google for its real-wordedness. (It's [bə-TEEK].)

(And, link of the day: IPA alphabet table with Unicode keys and full names, the latter of which I've never seen before. All the letters are named, not after their sound, but after the position or activity of lip, tongue, tooth and lung necessary to produce the sound. Yes, you've known this for years, but it's new to me.)

And I won a hand of Lamarckian poker! And then Shmike won with a royal flush (of the strongest suit, too) and rightly declared victory over the entire concept of that game. (In Volity vocabulary he could have said, "I have beaten the ruleset", or colloquially "I have beaten this URI".)

Journalism

Jan. 25th, 2002 12:17 pm
prog: (Default)
Bill Burkett just mailed me -- he found the silly con report I wrote that mentioned his talk (among many other things) from the XML 2000 Conference, over a year ago. He just wanted to express amusement, and say hi.

How wonderfully random... I actually know very little about this fellow or what he does, but still.

That reminds me: I got a call last week from a reporter who was interested in ComicsML. We gabbed for more than an hour about that and other cool XML applications, and I found myself plugging the book to the media for the first time. And caring how my name was spelled. (And Erik's.)


Good timing: ORA is publishing a book about SVG just as we're sending The Book off to production, and SVG is something that factors in greatly with two big projects I can't wait to dive into full-time for a while: ComicsML, and MIGS (the game system). Tasty stuff!
prog: (coffee_tummy)
My wonderful, hectic holiday week-and-a-half ended sometime yesterday, when I was able to make myself comfy with the thought of working again. Or, well, at least doing things besides socializing. Speaking of, I succeeded in the orchestrated social collision on Tuesday evening, though some badness threw off schedules and plans enough that it was a small gathering -- me and N and M and C and Q, two bags of Icehouse pieces, and M's homemade Zendo stones. Everything went like you'd expect it would, if you know any two of these people.

Today I made some nice progress with MIGS. At this time, I have a MIGS system that can set up a Tic-Tac-Toe board. Doesn't sound like much, but the upshot is that the project is far along enough to provide visible output, which is very encouraging. Of course, I still have everything to learn about SVG and, it turns out, JavaScript (actually ECMAscript, which seems to be a superset of JS, if anything), but I'm confident I can create the core of a nice little system fairly soon.

Meanwhile, feedback from tech reviewers has started to trickle in. Pre-feedback, really... mumbling about the holidays and how they'll have something in a few more days and such. (What does that remind me of.) Tomorrow morning, I'll shift back into that mode. Whew.


Maybe from reading other people's new years' resolutions, I have come to remind myself, once again, that my diet is The Devil. Really, beyond skin, teeth, hair and nails, I think all but ignore my bodily upkeep requirements. For someone who digs the mantra of planning to be around to see 2112 and beyond, I'm actually doing a piss-poor job on my end of the contract. (I have no direct control of the research on the immortality engine nanofactories, but I trust that it's coming along apace.)

I guess I could try the Hacker's Diet again... I actually stuck to that for more than a month before losing all momentum, couple of years ago. While the writing and pace seems to be aimed at obese people (I am merely soft) the presentation and core concepts are fine for all bad-slacker hackers: exercise every day, and don't eat when you don't need food. Simple. In theory.


I am listening to Tag's Trance Trip again. Mostly it's musical white noise, but I can't deny that it can be pleasant to work to.

I wonder what Mr. Tag is up to these days. One of things I liked best about this particular MP3 stream when I found it was the human voice who'd pop in at rare moments and talk about whatever. I think this first happened after I had been tuning in to the stream for well over a week: the DJ suddenly appeared, mumbling greetings and explaining that he had dropped by the studio to fix something. Then he dropped a screwdriver behind the desk and swore. I thought it was great.

I didn't mind as the months passed and he started feature himself more frequently to wax about Red Bull or the weather in SF, but when he started dragging his girlfriend (maybe wife now? not sure) on the air with him for lengthy sessions of goo-goo talk, I said: yecch, because I am a grump. So I explored, and now my iTunes stream playlist has many interesting channels on it. But lately I wander back to TTT-land again, and I have heard no voices at all. Hum.

Heh, I see Jim's name among the recent PayPal donators to tagstrance.com. Right on.


powerbarf.com is owned by squatters. Feh.

SVG

Dec. 13th, 2001 06:57 pm
prog: (Default)
Argh... I want to play with SVG right now, coz it's going to factor into Chapter 8, but none of Adobe's servers are responding... and a Google search tantalizingly reveals that a Mac OS X-compatible version of Adobe's SVG Viewer plugin exists! Argh argh argh!!!


I spent this afternoon turning my bedroom into someplace I don't mind living and working. Built the wireframe bureau I bought last week, put away all the clothespiles, emptied, flattened, and closeted all the boxes, shelved the books, vacuumed the rug, hung up the pictures, and kludged the curtains (until I can get some real curtain rings). All it really needs now is a whiteboard and a comfy chair. I suppose I could swipe the computer desk's chair, actually, since that is technically mine, but then you have the aesthetic incongruency of a nice chair up against a card table. Well, that aside, I feel very very at peace, sitting here. 's nice.


Why doesn't LiveJournal timestamp entries based on when it receives them? The only input I should give it is the timezone I currently reside in; it should figure out the local time based on that, not by trusting my local machine's clock.

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