Project Update: XMICYOA Progress

I actually find myself in an awkward position because I’ve forgotten some of the progress I made on XMICYOA last week, and rather than going back to dig through to find it I’ll just touch on the highlights. Most importantly, the first requirements for objects are in, which represents a key point in the XMI parser. We also now have token, state, and “stoken” (easily wiped tokens) databases to complement all the other features.

Character advancement is now stable, so you can now spend your advances to level up. As the example game starts you out at a (pathetic) baseline, this is a good idea. Everything works right with the database with saving, storing, and recalling information, so that’s a good starting place for this week’s news.

Requirements are also in on the XMI parser. They’re about as complex as something that isn’t a discrete “activity” gets. They’re the bit that determines what players can and can’t see. The current requirements are booleans for admin status and having specific tokens. Stokens will come shortly, then states; state requirements are more complex and will require about as much code as all the other requirements combined, since you will be able to dynamically set them up. State and attribute requirements are actually going to use the same function; you’ll just write in the XML file if you want it to check an attribute instead.

I added a couple little formatting things; you can now put in a HTML <hr> element using XMI parsing, which allows you to, say, separate possible actions from the narration. There are other theoretical uses, but they’re not prudent for general IF purposes; you could have a multiple choice test where you answer questions about your character in any order. I also changed my CSS a little; it’s got more practical forms. Even though I’m a hardcore Firefox user, I have to admit that XMICYOA’s example suite currently looks better in Chrome, which makes me a little sad.

I also set up XMICYOA’s home on SourceForge, which will be where I put the reference documentation for people who want to contribute to the project. Not much to see there, but it’s up.

Having said that, there’s not a whole lot to look at right now. XMICYOA’s still not “pretty” enough that I feel comfortable showing it to the world, but I’m going to show it to my creative project committee next time I meet with them. I’ll probably have a prototype up by the end of the month.

Edit: My WordPress install updated mid-writing of this post, so I lost most of it and it came up late. I sincerely apologize.

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