Today marks the 455th anniversary of the founding of Santiago de León de Caracas. Granted, the actual founding mired itself in bigotry and colonialist attitudes. However, in the centuries since, Venezuela’s pluralistic society has by all accounts created a beautiful city.

The Caracas downtown skyline

In any case…code.

Stack Overflow Antics

In the interactive fiction experiment that I mentioned a couple of months ago, I decided that I wanted to add a book. Since this project exists to amuse me, rather than a “normal” game book where the player looks up a key to get specific information, I wanted the ability to get a random topic.

I haven’t gotten it to work, so I tossed the question of how to “consult” without a topic to the Stack Overflow community. I didn’t have particularly high hopes for getting an answer, considering that only seventy-three questions (including my own) have the inform7 tag, as I write this. But I also don’t have any deadline hanging over my head on this.

Shockingly, however, I got a working answer in a reasonable amount of time. Short answer, I got my variables wrong, so now I can have characters flip through a book.

Meanwhile, I still don’t like the hoops that Inform 7 makes a developer jump through to seem English-like. But more than that, the IDE feels monstrous, knocking out other applications or crashing my entire laptop while it performs mostly ordinary tasks like compiling. And while I can find command-line tools—hidden in /usr/local/share/inform7/Compilers on Linux, if anyone else needs that detail—they don’t seem to provide any reasonable way of calling them.

The ni compiler, for example, only tells me that it started, or sometimes tells me that I should (or should not) have the -internal flag set, but the compiler hasn’t actually done anything. They extensively document an answer to the question “Does Inform Really Understand English”—spoiler, of course not—but can’t spare a few lines to explain how to compile a text adventure without the IDE…

Mystic T-Square

GitHub - jcolag/mystic-t-squareA possible game. Contribute to jcolag/mystic-t-square development by creating an account on GitHub.

We now have a game with some reasonable polish. In the week since it became a playable game, player now use the trivia API’s session tokens to prevent repeated questions, can update configuration options—such as turning off or resetting the token—and begun at least the infrastructure for keeping track of basic statistics on games and questions.

Again, I will probably give it a permanent URL that doesn’t require me to keep a server running, but if you’d like to try it out, you can play Mystic T-Square on my website, parallel to the Daily Nonogram, Daily Iungimoji, and Daily G.L.O.B.E..

Library Updates

I needed to bump library versions for Renew DB.

Next

I almost have Mystic T-Square where I want it, so I’ll finish testing/tweaking, this week. Expect Sunday’s post to formally announce the game at a permanent URL.

I also have some changes to the blog to re-test and check in, getting the plot-graphs to work in yesterday’s post, using Chart.JS. As you can probably tell from my GitHub history, it did not go particularly well.


Credits: The header image is Edificios de Oficinas Conjunto Parque Central by Esclasans, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International license.