Every little milestone counts...
May. 16th, 2005 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurTabula Rasa III has for years now been mostly a pile of random files -- sort of vaguely organized, but hard to make one's way around in. I've finally finished transcribing and organizing all of that into the Wiki dedicated to the game. ProWiki does seem to be paying off: the ability to build queries into pages makes it *much* easier to keep track of what's going on, and keep the whole thing reasonably consistent.
So, taking stock. After doing all the transcription (and lots of enhancement along the way), I now have about 20 significant factions, 34 significant plots and 104 character archetypes. That's not as many as it sounds like, and it's not enough yet -- a character archetype is just an aspect of a character, and I usually need several to make a really well-rounded one. (And this game is both large and complex.) But it's not a bad start, and there are several actual characters on top of that.
So I'm definitely making progress. Now comes the hard part: finishing the job of fleshing this whole thing out...
So, taking stock. After doing all the transcription (and lots of enhancement along the way), I now have about 20 significant factions, 34 significant plots and 104 character archetypes. That's not as many as it sounds like, and it's not enough yet -- a character archetype is just an aspect of a character, and I usually need several to make a really well-rounded one. (And this game is both large and complex.) But it's not a bad start, and there are several actual characters on top of that.
So I'm definitely making progress. Now comes the hard part: finishing the job of fleshing this whole thing out...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-16 10:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-17 01:29 am (UTC)The result is that all of my information is arranged in a loosely object-oriented fashion. Each page declares its own type, where the types are things like "World", "Character Archetype", "Plot" and so on. There are query pages that pull it all together. So for example, I have a page of all Archetypes, broken down by which world each Archetype is assigned to -- all of which is self-organized based on the declarations in the pages themselves. Each Item has its own page, and the Character pages simply list the Items in the possession of that Character; the system interpolates the descriptions of the items into the pages. Stuff like that. Basically, by making it all a bit OO, it becomes easy to build the web more robustly.
It's far from perfect -- truth to tell, if I'd known about FlexWiki before I started, I would have considered using that instead. (Flex is the Microsoft Wiki system -- only runs under IIS, but it's *very* powerful, with a rather elegant programming language available on pages. It would be a little less convenient, but can do almost anything.) And of course, it's a big blort of Perl -- it's derived from the UseMod codebase, and the code is far from beautiful.
But overall, the project has proven worthwhile. Being able to link all of the data together so easily, and especially being able to build automatic summary pages, has made it a lot easier for me to develop a really complex game. If you want an example of what it looks like, check out the ProWiki Home Page, and particularly the examples at the bottom. That demonstrates a sample LARP Schema (much simpler than the TRIII one, but structurally similar), and The Incredibly Dippy Subway Game as an example...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-17 05:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-17 01:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-17 03:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-17 05:17 pm (UTC)