You (and long-time readers) know that I've long been questing for the staggering potential we can unlock by committing to fully computer-based gameplay. But I've tended to overlook the immersive potential of full real-time visual feedback. I gestured at that in my master's thesis but didn't fully pursue that particular thread.
Your recent experiment with Keep on the Borderlands image generation, and some work I've done on interactive battlemaps, have got me thinking again about how to more thoroughly integrate visuals into computerized play. Thanks for stirring the pot further here. Maybe you were the only one in five decades until yesterday, but make space on the bandwagon for Joey and me!
I've imported my old blog, 21st Century D&D, into this website, tagging the posts with "21stcenturydnd".
I wrote that blog during the second half of undergrad, give or take. While doing QA on the import program, I reread all the posts to gauge how I've changed since 2016-2018.
I've improved as a programmer and game designer, and there are ideas in those posts that turned out to be dead ends, or which are chiefly of historical interest as signposts for how far I've come. Yet there's a reassuring and comforting continuity between what I was thinking then, and what I've accomplished since.
You can now upload a portrait for each of your characters. A character's portrait is displayed above the character sheet's table of contents. (#56)
Sage Knowledge
Version 0.6.0 brings multiple enhancements to sage knowledge support. First off, Zingor now supports multiple chosen sage fields/studies, since we have characters hitting levels where they get more! (#163)
Zingor now also supports sage study concentrations, the app's term for subareas to which certain sage studies' knowledge points may or must be assigned (#171). The rules for concentrations differ from study to study, and Zingor implements all of them:
On his blog, Alexis Smolensk takes down the argument that using AI ruins your writing, by detailing just how magically useful it is for assisting with your writing -- so long as you bother to use it intelligently.
Present-day D&D practice may not admit of a procedural manual, but ours might, no?
An initial chapter might explain the importance of having a place that you control as the game venue (generally your own house), explaining why playing in a public place is liable to have too many distractions, as well as giving advice for keeping the fridge stocked, ordering food ahead of time and all that jazz. Simple stuff, yes, but things that a noob might not think to do for an art form with a strong component of people management.
That last needs a whole chapter too: Paying attention to players' emotions. Stepping in to resolve conflicts that are getting out of hand w/ techniques like making everyone go for a walk to cool down tempers. Praising players for good planning, good cooperation, clever use of abilities.
First Hemingway I’ve read in a good long while. The stereotype is that he writes lots of short sentences, but I don’t think that’s true. He likes writes a lot of direct descriptive sentences, but also goes hog wild joining them together into the long run on that are expressive in the way poetry is: dense with imagery, occasionally wandering into philosophical speculation.
I was holding out hope that the ending would not be sad, but it was, and abruptly, viciously so.
Major: I added a party inventory search/filter interface on the homepage (#27). Use this to quickly hunt through all of the items the entire party is carrying.
Minor:
New button to mark all of a character's spells as memorized
In the form for adding items to inventory, I split the "weight" input box into two boxes, one for the number and one for the unit.
Containers can now use "items" as their capacity unit, instead of a unit of weight or volume.
Bugfixes
Deleting a container no longer deletes its contents; instead they go back into your normal inventory (#153)
Last night's first overnight Slartibartfast run was a success. I marked 4 issues as acceptable for it to work on, and it produced a draft pull request for each.
Tonight I whipped up a quick status monitor as an admin page on this website, so I can peek at what it's doing.
The costs shown below are not what I'm actually paying. To my knowledge, there's no straightforward way to understand how many tokens you have access to within each 5-hour Claude subscription window. Slartibartfast maintains statistics on how much work it can perform in 5 hours, then estimates both that window size and the cost per worker process, so I (and it) can eyeball how much work it can do in the remaining time. The actual stats are measured in tokens, but since those are large numbers, everything's converted to an approximate dollar cost for the end user.
I've spent the last few nights rolling myself a "software factory", a system for using an unattended coding agent to autonomously pick and work on issues from my GitHub repositories.
The system's name is Slartibartfast, after the hapless designer of fjords in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. For short, I call it "Bart".
The primary Bart process is a good old-fashioned program, not an AI. It runs on the same server that hosts my 3 live websites (Zingor; Unsphere; and this blog).
On startup, Bart builds a list of all open issues from my GitHub repositories which satisfy the following criteria:
