Weekly Schlep

First, I have to get this off my chest:

I think the move by Turbine to make LOTRO f2p is a bad idea. Based on its core design of heavily-instanced PVE encounters, I thought f2p was great idea applied to DDO ... but I have a bad feeling it is going to prove difficult to implement in the open world of LOTRO. However, I do think it is possible to pull off, so we'll see. The main thing I am worried about is a drastic increase in the already problematic issue of inappropriate names. Somehow I don't think there were any elves running around Lindon named "Drzztforchris" or dwarves mining the Iron Mountains named "Iwillchopu." Unfortunately for me, it breaks the game. Oh well - I am sure this fall I will be logging in for at least a bit to see what it's like.

WOTAN

Now that I have dealt with that bit of unpleasantness, I will move on to what I am really here to write about, and that is my weekly report on my non-epic schlep trek called Project WOTAN, the online single-player RPG/gamebook/pbbg/pcp/nwa/insert-cliche-or-acronym-here.

I am actually a bit ahead of schedule at this point, having finished the basics of the Treasure and Power modules. August is still looking good, though I wonder if I will be able to launch The Wizard's Tower as I had planned, or rather focus more on launching the code for WOTAN as FOSS. I am still undecided, and am leaving that decision for July so I can better gauge what is left to be done.

If, by early-July, I do not feel like I can pull off at least one decently-written gamebook to start TWT, then I will likely focus more on the generic engine. I realized that a demo site for WOTAN could function just as well as a game site in its own right. And rather than attempt to launch TWT prematurely with a randomized gamebook generator, I could make a site devoted entirely to randomized adventures with less relative effort than writing something I want to actually be taken seriously. Besides, OSS or not, I need to have a site that is diverse enough to show off what WOTAN can do, right?

The basic WOTAN site would eventually come to comprise many gamebooks mostly having no relation to each other. Whereas TWT or a site like it is meant to be taken itself as a series of books, there could be several concurrent series in wildly different genres with wildly different gameplay running on the "official" WOTAN site.

This morning I took a couple screenshots of my progress. Below is the basic User Control Panel. The same page virtually ever site in the world has. You'll notice that I have included a user avatar, which is actually a Gravatar. I am also strongly considering implementing an OpenID option for logins.

The basic User Control Panel

I know, it's hella rough looking, but obviously this is still an alpha work-in-progress. Below is an example of one of the things I did this past week, the Book Admin interface for the Treasure module.

Adding Treasure types to a Book.

I purposely left a custom tag, {book_name}, open so you can see how I am populating my static pages with data. So, in the pertinent view class for the Treasure module (in this case the auxiliary class treasure_widget) I merely use preg_replace to insert data from the database onto the page. (I am a big fan of preg_replace, lol.)

I probably should have used a pre-existing template engine, like Smarty for instance, but I chose not to. While not using one has been a learning experience, I have a feeling that in the future I will probably turn to an existing system.

This week I will be finishing up the core modules and their respective admin interfaces. I am expecting to create the admin panels for the Book-Page submodule to be something of a pain. I also have to create a whole other subsystem for the basic Character object. My goal is to have all these things done within the next 11 days, Friday June 18.

After I have all the core modules and their adminstration views (panels, interfaces, whatever you want to call them) essentially finished, probably 75% of the site will be complete as it will have all its basically functionality. Then I will be moving on to creating the views for the end user, the whole point for the site existing in the first place. And so during this time I will also be doing the bulk of the graphic design and it is looking like I am going to have to brush off my far-too-dusty pencils and actually create some artwork as well.

I am planning for July to consist mainly of polishing the site and adding non-core modules to the game. The most important of these modules will consist of character tracking and statistics, and possibly also a mechanism to cache data. I have also chosen mid-July as my final deadline for deciding on whether or not to put the WOTAN svn code repository on Google or GIThub and releasing it as GNU.

Either way, we should be seeing an August release of something interesting.