arix
Kai Lord
Posts: 1
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Post by arix on Jun 22, 2008 20:34:03 GMT
Hi, Dave. I have only one thing to say about "Seventh Sense": outstanding! It's so good, I downloaded it yesterday and I already finished the three books. I'd like to make you a suggestion. Why don't you publish in this forum instructions how to convert the rest of the books so that they can be played through your program? I think there may be volunteers who'll be willing to help you "translate" the HTML. Best regards.
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Post by alderaine on Jun 23, 2008 8:49:12 GMT
It's not possible to simply convert the books unfortunately. Each book contains new pages with additional rules.
It might be possible to consider building in a framework where most of the work was automatic, but the user could override it, but this would make the whole idea more complex.
We are working on a construction kit which will significantly reduce the time, but there is not a lot anybody can do to help with projects unless they are an expert in XML.
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Post by Dave on Jun 23, 2008 19:56:23 GMT
alderaine is right about it not being simple to convert. I do hope to assemble a small team once I rebuild my development tools (getting much closer!) and with the extra automation(as much as I can!) I am building in, releases should come in a relatively fast and furious manner.
However, each book does introduce new rules and problems that most often must be solved on a coding level, so it really isn't something that the community could do. Thanks for your comments and support, though, arix! Glad you enjoyed playing with the program. The next version will be quite a bit better!
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Post by jsager on Jun 24, 2008 15:10:21 GMT
Hey Dave -
Since you don't need me to do any programming work, might I make a suggestion?
Speed up combat!
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Post by alderaine on Jun 24, 2008 15:46:36 GMT
If I remember rightly, there are a number of options you can turn off to speed it up somewhat. Dave's program is written for elegance - giving the reader the full LW experience, and is very good at that You are more than welcome to work on a "quick" reader if you would like to? I made a start on one (and the first couple of books were working well, until I decided to completely redesign the back end so it is somewhat shelved now!) - this might be a good opportunity to write a first draft of the complete navigation XML for the first book, including an items XML file? Personally, I'd rather see more books up & running, and hopefully getting the common navigation file project moving will help with this
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Post by alderaine on Jun 24, 2008 15:54:55 GMT
Dave - what's involved in your development tools? It would be great to avoid duplication of effort if we can, so how do they fit in with the common navigation file project? I see the CNF project as a number of steps: 1/ A routine to read & process the existing XML, extracting every bit of information we can from it 2/ A toolkit to allow a user to work through the sections in a book, using the information derived above, and update the navigation information, etc 3/ A routine to take the output from the toolkit and write it back as updated XML which would form the new AON basic XML
Any LW book readers would then simply read the new XML - we would publish a number of guidelines to help do this in any languages we know of. We might also produce a module to convert the XML to, for example, CSV, to help book readers even further.
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Post by jsager on Jun 24, 2008 16:20:53 GMT
The CSV format unfortunately cannot always represent the same data that is represented in an XML format. The nature of XML is hierarchical, while the nature of CSV is "flat".
I do agree on the idea of making the common format the most important thing... my long term goal is to make a lone wolf reader that gives full gameplay functionality like seventh sense but that is delivered via a web browser using either adobe flex or microsoft silverlight (the rich experience in a browser).
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Post by alderaine on Jun 24, 2008 16:30:15 GMT
I never have problems representing information in CSV - it just requires an XML-style logic in the background to back it up (I have processed the whole of the first two books using just CSV files I'm a bit of a dinosaur though, from the days when hugely complicated financial transaction files went through as raw text files, where each line of the file started with a record key that told you which mask you had to use to read the data! (If you were lucky!) XML is significantly better & easier, when used for purpose. The AON XML, as you say, suffers from our point of view due to being written to support building web pages, not to help programs navigate. Don't focus on the reader functionality yet (unless you want to!) as we all need the XML updating An entirely web-based book reader would be the ultimate goal though. Whatever format you publish the information in, as long as it is sufficiently documented that it can be read from any reasonable programming language with minimal effort, I'm sure everybody will be happy. Publish your ideas here first though to be safe I would argue that a drastically simplified XML such as you presented above would be the best format.
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Post by jsager on Jun 24, 2008 18:01:32 GMT
Wait - the financial transaction records that you're talking about... are you talking about BAI format?
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Post by alderaine on Jun 25, 2008 8:44:28 GMT
A multitude of different formats from around the world, but that is just an example and goes wayyy off-topic to discuss here!
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Post by Dave on Jun 25, 2008 22:46:07 GMT
Yeah, don't hijack my thread - it's the only one I've got! If I understand correctly, not much currently exists in the XML (meaning not many books contain meaningful navigation informatiom). I'm not really versed in XML, and frankly, I don't have the time or interest to learn how to use it effectively. Once I finish my tools, I'll put up the source, and someone could easily incorporate a method of saving the needed navigation info into an XML file. Some of the navigation stuff will no doubt be specific to my program, but it could provide a decent starting point.
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Post by Dave on Jun 25, 2008 22:51:44 GMT
Nuts, all of my screenshots were nixed by imagehosting.com... Anyone want to take me up on that "design me a basic website" offer? It would be a big help to the project! Nothing fancy, just a place for some basic info,screenshots,download,etc.
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Post by alderaine on Jun 26, 2008 8:32:10 GMT
Presumably you'll host your site on AON? As far as I know, you can put almost anything there you need to. What I'm trying to get out of our XML programmers is a routine that will read the XML and save it into whatever format you need - I think that is quite some way off though! All the navigation information will eventually be in the XML, so all readers will eventually need to be using that source so they get the latest updates - I'm no XML expert either, so I need the XML interpreter as much as you
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Post by Dave on Jun 26, 2008 13:58:00 GMT
Presumably you'll host your site on AON? That's the idea. What about a tool that works in the opposite direction? I'm suggesting that when my development tools are finished (I anticipate they will be done much sooner than any significant XML changes), that someone who knows XML can add to the code, and have my editor export XML as we adapt books into the program. That would lay initial groundwork for other projects.
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Post by alderaine on Jun 26, 2008 14:13:23 GMT
That's theoretically possible, as long as the information in your tool is based on the original XML. Doing the final XML update will be an automatic one-stop (in theory!) - it does not matter what toolkit is used to do it, as long as it uses the current XML as its input...
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