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Archive for July, 2010

Sprucing Up the Old Homestead

Jul 30

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

We’ve had some changes around here lately.  A big storm came through a couple of weeks ago and took off another chunk of our tree, so we had to give up and have it removed.  It was very sad; that tree was really well-placed and looked great, and the garden looks much poorer for its absence.

Also, it’s time to repaint the house!  We got a recommendation for a good crew of painters and they just started work on the house a day or so ago.  So far they’re doing great work, and although the paint color Robin and I chose is not wildly different than what we had before, it’s different enough that we like it much better.  It’s a warmer beige with more reddish tones than the greenish-leaning one we had before.  We’re also going to a dark brown for the door and accents rather than black, and a nice light trim color.

Here are some photos of the havok going on in our yard:

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Moaning Myrtle Has Left The Building

Jul 26

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Humor | 2 Comments

My son Thomas has been voraciously reading the Harry Potter novels.  He’s now over halfway through the second one, and asked me the following question at dinner the other night:

Dad, why does Moaning Myrtle hang out in the bathroom?

I responded:

Well, she died in the bathroom, so that’s where she haunts now.

I kind of expected that to be the end of the conversation, but he had a followup:

Dad, did Moaning Myrtle die on the toilet, like Elvis?

Now, Thomas is 9.  I’d bet serious money that he has no idea who Elvis Presley is.  And he’s 9.  Did I mention he’s 9?  How did he possibly find out that Elvis died on the toilet?

No, I think she slipped and fell and hit her head.  But how did you know that Elvis died on the toilet?

Of course, I’m waiting with bated breath to hear this one.  And I guess it makes sense in retrospect:

Anthony [a kid at school] told me!

So now I’m left with trying to envision just how this came up in conversation.  Were they discussing Pokemon or their favorite Wii games, and Anthony just happened to bring it up?  “Yeah, the penguin suit is really cool, but the fireflower lets you shoot fireballs.  Hey!  That reminds me!  Did you know Elvis died on the toilet?”

I’m just coming up short here.

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Interactive Fiction WIP Progress Report

Jul 17

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in C++/C#/SQL/Web Programming, Computer, Games, Interactive Fiction, Writing and Philosophy | No Comments

I’m working on a project for this year’s Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp 2010).  It’s one that I started as kind of a small palate-cleanser after last year’s Comp, intended to be a quickie adventure for my son.  As I worked through the idea and setting, however, I realized that there was more there than I was planning on implementing, and I reevaluated the scale of the project.

The result is my current work in progress (still nameless for now).  I’ve been working on it almost since I submitted last year’s entry, aside from a couple of breaks, and I’m happy to report that I’ve completed implementation of the last puzzles and the ending sequence, at least in skeletal form.  Much of the early game is more completely implemented, but getting the “bones” of the rest of the game laid down means that I don’t have to worry too much about infrastructural issues any more, and can concentrate on finishing the writing and improving the polish.

I’m very relieved to be at this stage; I pushed hard to get here over the past month and am happy that I achieved this.  I can hear you saying “But Matt, it’s the middle of July!  Why are you worked up about completing your game when you have two and a half months left until the Comp submission deadline?!?”

Well, there are several reasons.  First, with a baby in the house that’s almost exactly as old as my WIP, plus two other young kids and a wife I enjoy spending time with, getting time to work on the project is not easy.  I’ve used almost the entire amount of my free time since the last Comp (except for a Dragon Age break) to get here, and I’ve needed it.  I know that finishing the rest of the game in time is still going to require focused effort, especially when school starts back up in the fall.

Second, I have a much better idea of what goes into creating a finished, polished game than I did last year.  For Grounded in Space, I didn’t give myself enough time for development, for learning the tools, or (most importantly) for testing.  This year, even with the game scaffolding implemented end-to-end, I still have the following left to do (in roughly the order they need to be accomplished):

  • Enhancing the in-game tutorial
  • Fixing some known game-derailing bugs
  • Write out the ending sequences in full
  • Test and enhance the default message modifications
  • Implement some additional short scenes and interactive dialogue
  • Review my keyword implementation to ensure it’s consistent and useful
  • Perform object testing a la Juhana’s Object Response Tests
  • Alpha testing
  • Revise my writing
  • Test compatibility on various interpreters and platforms
  • Set up Quixe-specific modifications required for proper keywording and exit-lister display
  • Do cover art and a blurb
  • Beta testing and bug fixing

So no, I’m not resting on my laurels having gotten to this point.  If anything, getting this far has only permitted me to lift my head up and see how far away the finish line still is.

Wish me luck — I’m going to need it!  And for all the other authors this year – both returnees and first-timers — I wish you the best of success with your stories!

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New Ethshar Serial Starting

Jul 13

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Books, Reviews | No Comments

After too long, Lawrence Watt-Evans is spinning up a new Ethshar serial — The Final Calling.  His Ethshar novels are excellent light fantasy, and are notable for having both a great amount of interesting, powerful magic as well as very believable, human characters that for the most part treat magic as just another phenomenon to deal with or use as they go about their lives.  They’re loosely-connected, for the most part; you can fairly easily jump in at any point.  I’ve enjoyed every one of these novels thoroughly since the first one — The Misenchanted Sword — was published when I was in high school, back in 1985.

The way these serial novels work is that every week, assuming enough contributions have come in to pay for it, he’ll post a new rough draft chapter.  Anyone in America who contributes $25 or more will receive a printed copy of the completed book (thresholds slightly higher for other countries).  It’s already paid through Chapter 11, and I haven’t sent my $25 yet, so I’m guessing this is going to be a pretty successful serial.

This seems like a pretty good way for authors to be paid to continue work on series they enjoy, and which have a strong fan base, but for some reason are not appealing to traditional publishing houses.  Lawrence Watt-Evans has used this model successfully for two Ethshar novels in the past, and is serializing a science fiction novel (a sequel to his earlier Nightside City) simultaneously.

Check it out if you enjoy light fantasy written with wit and intelligence!

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Upgrading to Inform 7 6E72

Jul 8

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in C++/C#/SQL/Web Programming, Computer, Games, Interactive Fiction | 2 Comments

With the recent releases of both the in-browser Glulx interpreter Quixe, and the newest Inform 7 Build 6E72, it was pretty obvious that I’d have to upgrade.  Sure, theoretically it would be possible to stick with the last version of Inform and manually roll out a playable website for my WIP.  But why turn down all the labor-saving power of the new “release along with an interpreter” option?  It automatically builds you a nice website, converts the Glulx file to Javascript for you, and packages it neatly up for release.  I’d also modified my source to remove the very few procedural rules I’d previously used, since I’d heard I7 is deprecating them, so I figured getting my WIP up and running wouldn’t be too arduous.

Happily, I was right!  I did run into about a dozen errors, which fell into two broad categories:

  1. Errors due to more strict syntax checking in the new build.  These were easy to find and fix — I spent maybe 5 minutes on these.
  2. Errors due to changes in the extensions I use.  My WIP uses a lot of extensions, and I hack some of them up a bit as well with overrides.  So pulling down the newest versions of all these extensions caused me a bit of worry.  Of them all, however, the only one that gave me any more than the most ephemeral trouble was the new version of Jon Ingold’s Flexible Windows.  Instead of a single drawing rule, it now uses an object-based rulebook, which required a couple of minor changes (as he points out in the changelog, I should note).  Actually making the code changes was easy; finding out exactly what needed to change was the trick.  Even this, though, didn’t take me more than about 15 minutes.

So the first thing I did now that I could get up and running in the new I7 was to set up Quixe and try a test release using it.  I was pleasantly surprised by the nice CSS defaults for the web pages.  The result isn’t quite up to the level of typography you can get with Gargoyle, of course, but for a literally no-effort setup it’s more than serviceable.  The only thing I ended up doing to the generated pages was to modify the User1 and User2 styles so that they reflected the colored text defaults that I start with, and I was off and running.

I have noticed that I7 is a touch slower to compile now than it was before, and generates a larger story file as well.  Before the upgrade I was running at just over 800 KB, and after the upgrade I’m up over 1 MB.  All the changes and improvements in the I7 release probably contribute to this, but I was pretty surprised to see the size of the generated file increase by 20%.  What this really means, I guess, is that it’s a good thing Quixe came out when it did, since the new I7 has pretty well priced itself out of the Z-machine’s range for all but the most trivial stories.

One thing I hope people continue to look at is the performance of Quixe.  The speed difference when running under Gargoyle vs. when running under Quixe is shocking — Quixe is at least an order of magnitude slower than standalone compiled interpreters, and I suspect more can be done to optimize Quixe given how brand-new the implementation is.  My fairly large WIP is certainly playable, but the slow response time is jarring.  Until speed improves I’ll still be playing most games through a standalone interpreter.

Now the only trick remaining is for me to work out how to support the dynamic color shifting for user styles that the standalone interpreters can use.  I have an extra window created below the status line that should be able to display one of four choices of colored text depending on what the user wants.  I’m thinking that with some judicious changes to the standard styles for that window, along with some minor changes to the code that displays the text, that I can support the appropriate choices in Quixe with a single set of CSS.  If I can’t, I guess I can create alternate windows with different color settings in their specific CSS sections and swap them in appropriately.  I’ll just have to ensure that whatever I end up doing for Quixe doesn’t break the solution I’m using for other interpreters.

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A Special Morning at the McDonald’s Playplace

Jul 6

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

On our last day of our 4th of July staycation, the whole extended family went out to McDonald’s for breakfast.  We chose this for two reasons:

  1. We’d eaten all the eggs and didn’t have anything prepared for that morning, and
  2. It had been raining constantly for the last 24 hours and we wanted to get out of the house and go somewhere the kids could play.

So we ended up at Mickey D’s.  We deliberately chose the one nearby that doesn’t have video games, so we wouldn’t have to constantly chase the kids away from them.

When we got there, there was only one other family there.  A deaf man was there with two cute little toddler girls.  We couldn’t tell whether they were hearing or not; they just signed to communicate with their dad.  Over the course of breakfast, several other families arrived as well.  Towards the end of the meal, Thomas was walking around with a little Hispanic girl that either couldn’t or didn’t speak, and who looked slightly dysmorphic.  She was hugging him with a huge smile on her face, and wanting to hold hands as they went around the play area.

It was fairly obvious that she was special-needs of some sort; after Thomas and the girl played together for longer, her mother came over and told us how wonderful she thought Thomas was, as he was “the only child that was ever nice to her”.  Even allowing for a bit of maternal exaggeration, we were extremely proud of Thomas for his kindness and tolerance for being hugged and fussed over, even though it was obviously a bit embarrassing for him.

Shortly before we left, another young boy came in with his parent or caregiver.  He was an African-American boy who looked to be about Katherine’s age, and he was also either mostly or completely nonverbal.  He bounced a lot and hooted, and was approximating some sign language.  He had the hugest grin on his face the whole time; it was obvious that he loved being in the Playplace and was having a great time!

So, counting Katherine for our family, there was exactly one couple there who did not have a special-needs child at the Playplace that morning — Robin’s sister and brother-in-law Polly and Rick.

I think before we had Katherine and learned to understand and deal with her autism I would have been really freaked out with that many special-needs kids around.  But given where we’re at and what I’ve learned over the past few years, I just enjoyed the fact that everyone was playing together really nicely and having a great time, whether or not they had any disabilities or differences.

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