Text Adventure Experiment

So for, I dunno, a week or so, I've had an entry in the page list called "Text Adventure Experiment". I created it upon a whim, because I wanted to experiment with a text adventure and I figured Silverlight would be a good way to do it for the web, since it allows me to program in C#. I guess it's presence alone has tripped flags with a few people, because its in my top 5 pages on Google Analytics, but it hadn't actually been doing anything.

The reason this is the case is because TinyMCE, the editor that PivotX uses, was automatically filtering the type of object into being a Flash object, instead of Silverlight. I tried patching TinyMCE and it didn't help, so I tried digging around in the other PivotX code but there wasn't really any references anywhere else that I could figure out. So I decided to just set trying to embed it directly aside for now and just create an include file to dump the code into the page at a later stage, and so it runs now.

There's really nothing to it yet. The build on there so far is pretty much just a bare template, only managing the drawn text and keeping things moving. No scrolling, but I don't think I will have it scroll text in the first place, because old text adventures I've played didn't have scrolling. Since I only just got it working I haven't tested yet to see if it will work in Linux with the Moonlight plugin, although I'm not doing anything extraordinary so I doubt I'm using unimplemented functions. I'll update it as I work on it, and leave revolving notes on that page, but right now I don't even have Visual Web Dev Express installed yet since I upgraded my hard drive last week.

Missed Block

Okay, so apparently, I missed actually adding the last part of The Pocketwatch I had written. So there are two new parts now, Revealing and Bait and Switch. I had finished Revealing some time back, and thought I had posted it, was having trouble trying to finish Bait and Switch the way I wanted to. I finally got it right, though.

In the mean time, I've been busy the last week working on a project. A bit of idea block has held me up for the last few days so I'm not quite done with it yet. As such, I'll talk about it more when I am done

No School Tomorrow

So there's a proposal right now to eliminate 12th grade in Utah. This is being done to try and save money in a state budget deficit. Now it may be something that would help with the budget, but I really do not like this idea.

As it is, education is rather strained, but education overall is something that, if anything, should be increased if possible. Cutting things more just makes the kids not prepared for college, and not prepared for the working world. We're struggling to recover from a recession, and the only way its really going to gain speed again is with a well educated young work staff to push forward science and technology.

Charitable Music

Not much to update about right now, just wanted to say that anyone with an XBox 360 should get the Live Arcade game Chime, a rather addicting music puzzle game. But mostly, because the royalties for this game are donated to the OneBigGame children's charity organization. So go do it.

Visually Speaking

As I continue working on Red Ice, I realized I needed to come up with some sort of map of everything, because, since its a fictional land and not based on our world, trying to keep track of locations in an unknown land just in my head is rather complicated. So I decided to sit down and make a map.  

http://www.regularspelling.com/images/redicecontinent.png

I generated a continent layout for the entire planet, but the novel takes place only on one of the continents so I'll worry about detailing the others later. It's not incredibly detailed, I haven't come up with the names of most of the current referenced locations, and I'm really not sure about the distance scale. I'll probably rearrange some things later as I figure them out better, but for now there's a good general idea at least.