*God*, I love this project

[jducoeur]

I'm rapidly fleshing out the Querki Use Cases and Features. The Feature list is growing terrifyingly fast, but that's what the Use Cases are for: they are going to help drive which features get implemented when. (And more importantly, which features to *not* implement yet. I'm going to have to pick my battles carefully. Nothing gets implemented until we have a concrete use for it.) I'm starting to sincerely believe that this will be useful enough that people will buy memberships.

I think I'm going to start talking about Use Cases, something like one a day, over on the development blog (querki_project). Please come join in over there, kibitz and comment, point potentially interested friends at it, and keep the ideas coming! The "what we're going to try to accomplish" train is rapidly gaining steam, and the project is looking ever-cooler and more useful...

Comments

[kihou.livejournal.com]

It's cool to see you running with something that's conceptually a lot like my Bazki personal project (http://bazki.mit.edu/, but there's not much there), but sufficiently ambitious and aimed at the real world instead of Assassins' Guild LARPers. You certainly have some nifty ideas.

[jducoeur]

Parallel evolution, and it's neat to see someone else who came to the same conclusions. Querki evolved from ProWiki, the system that I built about ten years ago *specifically* for LARP-writing. I needed something flexible and powerful there, and have been using it for a decade -- it was just too hard for anybody else to use.

When I sat down to write something that would be *easy* to use, I started realizing just how broadly useful it would be. But I still expect LARP design to be one of the major early use cases, at least for my friends...

[kihou.livejournal.com]

Sure, but "LARP-writing in general" and "for the Assassins' Guild" are not quite the same thing. You probably don't have mandatory features like:

* Subversion text file interface, or similar
* LaTeX-ish markup support
* LaTeX=>pdf rendering support

Presumably Querki will at some point give me enough rope that I could consider migrating to it, and it's presumably going to be much slicker than something I'm going to put together myself. And the multiple-app nature of it probably would be a cleaner way of handling the separation of "Game Content", "Player Apps", "Per-run State", and "Runtime Interface".

[jducoeur]

Heh. True, although it'll have native versioning, so the Subversion aspect isn't entirely relevant. The LaTex support is a more interesting question, though. Fancy printing is still an open question, and that's an interesting way to support it. I may well decide to open that widely for plugins.

Anyway, once it gets mature enough, we should talk features in more detail, and see what else is needed to make it feasible for your use case...

[kihou.livejournal.com]

The Subversion support isn't just for versioning; it's also to satisfy people who don't want to use a browser or learn a new workflow. (The Guild has both large "hates anything non-commandline" and "hates the commandline" contingents.)

LaTeX for the PDF export is mainly because then I can use our existing code for rendering pretty item cards, etc and be at prettyness-pariety with standard (i.e., GameTeX) games. I don't know what other options there are for pretty PDF, but it seems likely that you'll want some option there. (If I'm keeping my recipes there, I also want to be able to get the same recipes in a pretty book.)

[jducoeur]

Yeah, the requirement is clear -- many use cases will require nice printing. But it's a big, complicated problem, so I'm being careful not to jump to any conclusions too quickly. Coming up with something that is flexible, powerful and easy enough for normal users is going to be somewhat tricky. (Similar to the page-layout problem, but much more persnickety.)