soaring majestically above the foam

As promised, the Soar object library is now checked into GitHub. I’ve been developing a new project with it, and the showstopper bugs seem to be gone. Accordingly, I have deprecated the Foam library.

not feeling so foamy anymore

Foam, the library I created to wrap WebGL, is getting a little moldy. It was written at a time when I wasn’t well-read on the possibilities of objects in JavaScript, and I was just excited about creating 3D graphics in a browser. I think it’s time to retire the faithful old dog and let it slumber by the fire.

So what’s to replace it? I’ve written a new library called Soar. It’s not checked in yet, nor is it well-tested, but I’ll be doing both in the days to come. Soar is fully prototypal and object-based, and avoids the increasingly embarrassing code Foam requires to handle even the most basic inheritance.

I was considering updating Fissure and pavo to run on the new library, but I’d rather not. I think they all sort of belong together in a way. On with the new.

service resumed, for now

Everything seems to be in order. I have to say that WordPress is looking pretty good these days. I dumped it a few years back in favor of Habari, a lightweight alternative that sadly isn’t seeing much action anymore. Though I wish I wasn’t locked into a MySQL back-end (higher cost for me), I appreciated how quickly I was able to get back up with WordPress. Thanks, folks!

Ironically, I’m going dark tomorrow for the SOPA/PIPA protest. See you on the other side.

 

technical difficulties

Tumblr seems to have yanked my blog without warning or reason. Thanks, folks. I’m back to self-hosting; probably for good. It’ll be a little hectic around here as I reassemble things.

pavo has escaped

If you look to the sidebar, you’ll see a new item. Yes, pavo is complete.

So, what the hell is it? I had originally planned it as an RPG, but it didn’t want to go that way. Instead, it’s become an experiment in interactive fiction. The scope is not as large as I had originally planned, in either physical or narrative space. I did have the option of expanding it, but it’s spawned a lot of new ideas that I wanted to work on, so I felt the best thing to do was find a good stopping point and wrap it up.

It’s been tested on Chrome and Firefox under Windows and Linux. I have noticed an odd bug in FF/Windows (and nowhere else) where the game space stops redrawing if the window is resized. I will be looking at that. If you notice anything else, please drop me a line.

Oh, and I’ll be posting the source code on github today as well.

I’ll have to see a script first

I’ve completed the rough script for pavo. What remains is writing the metadata–in its own way, as much of a challenge as the script itself, as this is where the game logic is really implemented–and running through as much testing as I can before the itch to release becomes unbearable.

Anyone who’s played through Fissure (and I have no idea if anyone has) might notice a few similar ideas leaking through in pavo. Thing is, Fissure and pavo share a common ancestor: a game called Transients that I never got around to creating. In that game, you would have assumed the role of a robotic probe imprinted with the personality (and certain memories) of a human being. The goal would have been to explore a space cave (there’s the Fissure connection) as well as your own past (and there’s a hint of what’s to come in pavo).

Still hoping for a mid-January release.

work in progress still in progress

“Major coding has been completed.” I so want that on a t-shirt, or a gravestone. It seems that in the last week I’ve completely rewritten the dialogue code several times as my ideas change.

I do have strong ideas about how I want the player to interact with pavo and what I want to be going on underneath. I’m trying out some models that I’ve had over the last couple of years regarding how dialogue, and by extension storytelling, can work. I’ll cover that in more detail once the game’s released. For now, the work continues. I’m not moving the release date out of its somewhat vague “mid-January” area just yet.

Happy? New! Year.