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Sometime this evening Melissa and I will have known each other for exactly three years, having met at a Halloween party. She was dressed as the incredibly hot Dark Angel (you can barely make out the wings). I was dressed as a guy in a turban who was too fat for his suit.

That evening we both went home with someone else. Three years… man have things changed.

Spending this afternoon at Lestat’s. Wishing I had this t-shirt.

If you’re at all superhero inclined you owe it to yourself to check out the Tales of the Sinestro Corps Superman-Prime special.

DC and Marvel are often slammed for having too much back story, too much continuity. Well here we have Geoff Johns tells the story of one of DC’s more complicated and continuity-thick characters is also one of the more tragic. It’s not just the story of Superboy-Prime’s decent but a pretty good summery of the various retcon’s DC’s done.

And he does it all in one issue.

Known bugs:
Firefox:

If the adBlock Plus plugin is running when you load this page it will crash your browser when you leave the page.

IE 7:

There is still a crack in between the input line and the display.
IE seems to have a different way of reading XML DOM. Thus anything relating to inventory doesn’t work.
The page is supposed to load with the text describing the beginning room. Instead the player has to start by (l)ooking.

Background image scrolls with text. It’s supposed to be fixed to the area.

“Play” Zorjax

Not much so far: You can go to the other room, get the knife and bring it back. But I now have most of the essentials finished, or at least enough of the essentials done to know that I need to do a complete rewrite of the command parsing. I have too many commands hard coded in the JavaScript so if someone wanted to go n,e,w,or s they’re be ok but if they wanted to go sw they’d be screwed.

Goal for next version: Have all verbs in the XML, even defaults, even shortcuts.

I’ve decided to create an application for running Infocom-style text adventure games through the web. An application that allowed someone to easily create their own adventure games without an artist or a programmer.

Technologies:

• JavaScript w/Prototype – processing user commands and interpreting the XML.
• AJAX & PHP – Load and save games in XML on the server

So far all I have is the basic interface. It doesn’t do much yet, just parrots back whatever the user types in. Also, there are two annoyances in IE7; a crack between the textarea and the input area and when focus is set to the input area the cursor is all the way over on the left.

XML Structure:
These are the only files a game designer should have to touch:

game.xml will just have some basics; list of chapters and their file names and a pointer to starting chapter.
chapter.xml sheets will hold information on interface appearance and starting character traits. The rest will be split into three main sections: Places, Things and People.
save.xml inventory list, current character traits and plot points (did character throw the switch on the big dark machine? y/n)

Syntax:
For there to be any “game” in the game I’ll have to put a command structure into the XML itself. I’m thinking they’ll look something like:

<things>
    <radio
        look="It looks like a standard transistor radio"
        play="You turn on the radio.||TUNE rocksong.mp3||You rock out."
    ></radio>
</things>

In this example the verb play will be split by the ||’s into three commands. The first and last are going straight to display by default, but the middle command starts with the command TUNE which will tell Zorjax it’s time to play the file ‘rocksong.mp3′.

Last night I came up with a list of commands that I’ll need for starts:

• IF – essential, and the conditionals are going to be a pain in the ass. might result int an END of the command or SKIPing a line.
• SFX – play sound once.
• TUNE – play sound on loop
• WAIT – delay a number of milliseconds
• IMG – change the background image of the textarea
• ADD – put an item in the inventory
• DROP – remove and item from the inventory
• MOVE – teleport character to new place
• CHAR (+/-/ ) – modify characteristic
• SET – set plot point
• GOTO – go to new chapter
• RAND – random number, for damage or IF statements

Big Challenges:

• Command parsing – I’m pretty sure I can program a simple command structure based on VERB NOUN or even VERB NOUN with/from NOUN but user commands like all, no or one will be more of a challenge.
• Speech – Interactive NPC’s are going to have to talk. I’m hoping I can incorporate AIML into the first version of Zorjax.
• Party NPC’s – I think it’d be neat to have characters follow the PC around. And I’m pretty sure how I’m going to do it, but it’s probably not going to be as easy as I think it is, especially if I want them to talk. This’ll probably wait until a future version.

I hope this is going to be a bigger hit than sothen.org was.