( picoVerse kjell-:( An opening line ) )

As I fell asleep on the couch( probably choking on apnea ) and woke up
right now: this was waving through my head inquiring: "beer me!":  so
i will here relate:

grinding gears that:

Some were the size of watermellons like dissembodied brains in vats of
gelatinous goo.  Some were walking on two or more legs and looked like
characters in one of the ancient space operas.  Some where extremely
athletic.  Most, highly attractive.  But some, ancient pure breds,
having no enhancements at all.  Like costly antiques with no plastic
in them.  They grate, unapologetically, and wander through a space the
size of a billion Manhattans headlong through space at 90% of c.
Headlong through the darkness already 700,000 years deep.  But who's
counting?

--------------

So this ^ is the opening 1 or 3 paragraphs of a text based online
game, or a book, or a script, or a what have you got.  eventually i
would mention that c = the speed of light.  but not right away.  maybe
not at all.

Now i can get this far without too much trouble.  i guess.  maybe i
haven't even gotten this far even though i just did.  but farther i
come to a grinding halt.

You see.  The story is about a people, an animal, who have lived
together for 700,000 years plus.  No doubt they have become highly
civilized.  Somewhat like the Chinese, in their better centuries,
perhaps.  And that civilizing influence squashes out the drama.  no
doubt.  And you see this in the Chinese literature, I have heard, that
it goes along and reads along and keeps going and finally it just
stops.

And that is my problem.  too much Chinese and not enough Greek.

If they are so civilized and modern.  And have lived so long.  Except
for the antiques which would live and die and be born anew.  Then
where, oh where, is the drama.

I would like to make a story about such a place.

But i have no Characters and i have no drama.

essentially i have no story.

at all.

i just have a place.  like the air tight garage.

all i have is a giant space ship 1500 miles long by deep by tall.  a
giant borg cube.  so to speak.  called the new Jerusalem.  one of
millions of them all called the new Jerusalem.  this one traveling
between one galaxy and another.  when it gets there it will chart a
course that takes it near to a sequence of stars which will slow it
down gradually over millenia until it finally comes to a halt around
one of them that has solid resources.  where it will stop and build
new Jerusalems and colonize the galaxy they come to.  it turns out
that they are coming to earth.  and the name new Jerusalem gets pasted
onto them when they get here.  so it seems like they came from earth
until they get to earth.  and the people of earth see their future
selves.

okay so I can get that far.

i can get to the setting.  but i just can't get to the story.

perhaps using some classic is in order.  Milton, Shakespeare, Austin.

take your pick.

if there is no story then how about doing the whole thing as one big poem.

so i need a story people.

i need some Characters.

so i am throwing the idea out there.  and i am hoping i get back some
crazy ideas that won't work.  or some edits.  which i may or may not
use.  which will lead to what i want.  or most probably nothing at
all.  i guess.  i'm sure.

The online game could be some combination of the infocom games and the
dungeon and dragons games and games in general and a book or a script.
 I want there to be a lot more text than there is in most text based
games.  so that it becomes like reading a book.  some of this text is
generated.  and how that works I don't know.

perhaps some of the players could be god level actors who interact
with the other players according to scripts.  which they combine.
according to automated dice.  like in the face to face dungeons and
dragons games.

this ship the new Jerusalem is so big that it can contain just about
anything you want.

so think about it.

an if you get any ideas for a story

then reply them to this e-mail.

as crazy and unworkable as they might be.

that's okay.

this is whatchamacallit brain storming.  i will want to suggest.

so anything goes.  probably i will get nothing.  but so what.

I was thinking that some kind of simple graphics could be used along
with the text of the game.  just some lines to map out where things
are but you have to use your imagination to see what they are.  The
text gives you that.  And we delete a lot of the lines to keep it
poetic.  So if a room was like a square box then you would get rid of
a lot of the lines and more like make a path through the room and the
things in it.  perhaps each thing would have little handles sticking
out of it that you could click on that would say things about it.
Each Entity might have lines sticking out of it with dots on the ends
that you could click on.  that would produce other entities and or
text.

perhaps there is a way that it can help you to make commands that make
sense that you can evaluate if you were a player in the game.  perhaps
the game could lead to a general form of colaboration.  In the infocom
games it was not always easy to make commands to the game.  so there
is this feeling of being stuck all the time.  Perhaps some kind of
intellisense thing could help.

i want to do this game in Smalltalk.  in Squeak or Croquet or Dolphin
or VisualWorks or all three.  Perhaps with picoLARC lambdaLisp (
sourceforge.net ) as a command language.  where people are building on
the game as well as playing it.

i guess Croquet is the most natural platform since it has game making
built into it already.

i have made a picoCroquet that is really simple and minimal and is
designed to work on the internet using TCP.  All the machines are
formed up into a tree on the web with the root node performing the
task of synchronizing all the Messages.  it does this by a simple
rule.  all Messages must go through the root and back out to all the
machines in the tree.  i don't want a lot of animation messages.  just
command messages.  so that would reduce the traffic.

i have made the first cut at the first version in Croquet Squeak.
probably i should keep it going in Dolphin and VisualWorks as well.
Dolphin doesn't have TCP.  Squeak is good because I can do whatever I
want with it.  But I don't want to abandon Dolphin.  VisualWorks is
hard to download but it has TCP.  Dolphin looks the best.  And is
easiest to program.  At least for me.  I wish that Squeak could do
multiple seperate OS based windows instead of just the single one that
has the Squeak windows inside of it.  It's easier to interact with
other programs if you can have multiple windows.  But okay i guess i
can live within Squeak for now.  A Package system that could be
written the same on all three Smalltalks that could facilitate
transfer of code between the three would be good.  Some kind of Ansi
thing.

so any ideas you might have

just send them.

like how could text be generated?

some kind of context free thing?  instead of compiling you are generating?

what story?  what characters?

what stories have you liked?  maybe they could be incorporated.

perhaps each player makes a story that lurkers can follow

perhaps the lurkers could be the game for the players?  making little
tweeks and plot twists here and there?

-Kjell

http://jabberwocky.croquetproject.org:8889/ seems not to be working
anymore....

Hans

Dear Hans,

It should work now.  Thanks for letting me know,
Liz Wendland
UofM

Baveco, Hans wrote:
> http://jabberwocky.croquetproject.org:8889/ seems not to be working
> anymore....
>
> Hans
>  

On Mon, 2008-04-07 at 06:08 -0700, Kjell Godo wrote:

> perhaps the lurkers could be the game for the players?  making little
> tweeks and plot twists here and there?

Let Hunter S. Thompson be your guide. You can't miss. :) Ric

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