Help!
Coder/Designer needed to assist in getting down and dirty with a number of knotty problems which I no longer have the time/resources to address on my project. You will need to be Perl/PhP literate, have a passion for gamebooks, and possess a keen sense of humour (you’ll need it). As this is not a commercial venture I am looking for someone who wishes to excercise their skills in their spare time on something they are interested in.
If you are interested send an email to me at (help at fighting fantasy dot org).
Sign Up Problems
Have reverted to old signup system as there seems to be a problem with the sign up process at the moment, am working on it and hope to have it sorted a.s.a.p.
New Play Area Interface
I have now integrated the Play/Create area with the CMS, basically just looks a lot more presentable 🙂 The new link to play is under ‘Gamebooks’. It is still experimental and I haven’t tested everything yet, but so far it all looks good. One feature that is hard to use under the new system is ‘Create HTML Adventure’ since the output becomes part of the CMS output. I will address this soon, in the meantime the old interface link is still available to make life easier in this respect or if you discover something broken.
HTML File Output for your Adventures
Writers may now generate a XHTML file from their adventures, simply click on the link in your Adventure Creator book listing and save the resulting page 🙂
It’s not perfect, any references that are NOT enumerated (i.e. ‘background’, ‘introduction’, ‘rules’ etc.) will appear in random order previous to the enumerated entries, which WILL be listed in order. All ‘tt’ tags will be converted to internal anchor links and all other ABML tags will be stripped. XHTML tags will pass through so your formatting will be safe.
If the random ordering of non enumerated pages is really a problem (i.e. you have a lot of seperate ‘rules’ pages) the file is quite easily edited in a text editor (notepad or similar, I STRONGLY suggest you avoid MS Word or similar if you want to keep your documents net-safe – I haven’t sorted out Unicode handling yet so even compliant editors like OpenOffice will throw in characters I have yet to deal with)
Graph your Adventures!
There is now a new feature in the ‘Adventure Creator’ section of the play area – Generate GraphViz DOT code.
If you are unfamiliar with GraphViz, it is a free application you can download from GraphViz.org that generates flowcharts from formatted code. The link in the adventure creator will generate the necessary DOT code for you from your adventure, all you have to do is paste it into GraphViz and bingo, you will know where you have lost links, unlinked references, and can see the flow of your adventure generally in a very easy to see manner, as you can see above (don’t look too carefully if you want to avoid spoilers!)
XHTML allowed in ABML
The majority of XHTML is now allowed in your ABML documents (i.e. you may now use many html tags when creating your gamebooks). Please check the ABML Reference under ‘Creating Adventures’ for details.
Mystery characters dealt with
The mystery characters that have been appearing in adventure text should now be mostly gone (largely smart apostrophes and quotes). There may still be the odd occasional weird character showing up in places – blame microsoft text editors – let me know what reference and adventure they appear in so I can fix that character type. If you have difficulty even now with what should be quotes/apostrophes please update your browser (Mozilla Firefox FTW).
“Welcome to Blackheart Asylum” Republished
“Welcome to Blackheart Asylum” by Julius Lee has been republished in the Hosted section as a turn-to adventure, however there are still some charset issues that make it a touch unpleasant to read that I have yet to fix.
“The Yaethyr Cycle The Achaeid Book 1 The Enriyes” Republished
“The Yaethyr Cycle The Achaeid Book 1 The Enriyes”, by Ramsay Duff has been republished in the Hosted section as a turn to only adventure.