Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

Got this done enough to share with people, on a release early, release often basis.  It’s probably only of interest to RPG nerds, unless you want an easy way to set up fortune cookies in your TiddlyWiki…

Rollon Plugin – a plugin for rolling randomly on tables

The goal of Rollon is to make creating and rolling on tables as easy as editing a wiki, or cutting and pasting from a blog or web page.

Rollon is a TiddlyWiki plugin designed to let you roll randomly on tables, such as you might find in roleplaying games. When we talk about “tables” in Rollon, we don’t mean an HTML , just a list of entries such as a Wandering Monster Table or Treasure Table might have. To Rollon, any tiddler containing a list is potentially a table, whether the list is an unordered list, an ordered list, a dictionary list, or even just text where each line starts with a number. This gives you a great deal of freedom in designing lists, or cutting and pasting them into your TiddlyWiki from other sources.

I’ve been getting back into Javascript coding recently, and as is my wont I immediately start looking around for a) a unit testing tool, and b) a toy project to fiddle around with where I don’t have deadline pressure and am free to try more cutting edge technologies than at work (where, for example, we’re still limping along on Java 1.4 and IE 6, because for a large corporation upgrading tens of thousands of workstations is a headache of Brobdingnagian proportions).

For the first, there’s jsUnit. Whenever I wonder whether my profession really is making progress, given that many of the complaints in The Mythical Man-Month could have been written yesterday instead of thirty years ago, I comfort myself with the fact that whatever language I start fiddling with I can count on there being an xUnit test framework just a Google search away. jsUnit appears to be a fairly straightforward port of jUnit, so it should be easy enough to get the hang of. I also see that it comes with a mini server app that’ll let you incorporate jsUnit tests into Ant scripts, which should be useful if I ever try to sell my workplace on using it.

For the second, I’m contemplating rewriting my Python table rolling program as a plug-in for TiddlyWiki, because that’s mostly what I’ve been using lately for campaign notes for my RPGs, and it already has all the javascript objects and methods I’d need for self-modifying an html page based on the results of rolling on the tables. The more I look at it, the more I admire TiddlyWiki’s simplicity and flexibility, and it’s inspired me to a new approach to defining random tables for games. Where before I had a fairly elaborate special-purpose XML mark-up language, now I’m planning on just using standard HTML (with maybe a few extra attrs). You want a list of options? Make an HTML list, then just use a TiddlyWiki macro to roll a random result from the list.

My friend Doug showed me the Lego StarWars video game for the PS2 yesterday. On the plus side, it’s really cute…it really looks exactly like the Lego toys, and controlling the characters is like suddenly being able to play Irregular Webcomic

Also the controls are fairly easy to get used to, though I miss the ability to rotate the camera so I can see what I’m doing better. And the way the opponents fall apart into their little constituent lego blocks when you carve them up with your light-saber is a hoot.

On the minus side, it faithfully follows the movies, episode by episode, and I can’t think of anything I’d less like to spend time doing than being reminded point-by-point of the horror of The Phantom Menace, which is when I swore off the movies absolutely. Among other things, you have to pod-race. I left the theater to read in the lobby during the last umpty-seven laps of the pod-race (I’m told there were four total, each one seemed like a dozen), so I’m not the target audience for this. As my friend Paul says of me “The disdain is strong within this one.” Not even the ability to carve up Jar-Jar Binks when you first meet him (yes, Doug assures me that you can) is a strong enough lure.