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A coding project you may be interested in.

PostPosted: Wed Jun 11, 2014 9:45 am
by kylesgames
I've been working on something for a while called XMICAE (eXtensible Markup Initialized Customizable Adventure Engine) that is essentially going to serve as a browser-based interactive fiction/text-based RPG platform compatible with almost any PHP/MySQL setup.

As of this morning, it is up in both , and I have a .

I'm not entirely sure how interesting this is to most people on 1km1kt, but it has the potential to be used for stuff like creating a brief demo of your own game and hosting it for the public to view, at least once the rolling functionality is fully implemented.

Re: A coding project you may be interested in.

PostPosted: Wed Jun 11, 2014 6:17 pm
by Onix
I'm into programming, I've looked into xml systems for story creation, but I haven't had a lot of interest in the ones I've seen before. What are you trying to accomplish with this engine?

Re: A coding project you may be interested in.

PostPosted: Wed Jun 11, 2014 7:43 pm
by kylesgames
It's an alternative to StoryNexus, with more of a focus on being game-friendly while still offering a full range of IF tools. Unlike StoryNexus, it is also user-opaque, allowing for storytelling with hidden variables (something that I didn't like about StoryNexus). It's also open-source.

The three central goals are to have easy content creation (through the form of specialized XML), be highly portable, and include extensibility support. It is also (hopefully) going to include simple configuration-driven installation, so that all you need to do to get it to go is drop it onto a W/L/M/XAMP stack and run an install script after pointing it to a MySQL database. Examples of extensibility support include multi-stage combat, something that would be difficult to implement on a non-extensible platform such as StoryNexus, though at this time there is no plan for extensibility to support anything but native PHP; there may be a feature library (and hopefully a tutorial, once I get off my lazy butt) to touch on how to get extensions set up and coded.

Other, lesser, goals include having some random dynamic story elements (GearHead, a roguelike giant robot game, is a large inspiration here), multiplayer elements, and such.

It doesn't have any procedural content generation (barring an experiment with procedural weather, which includes a basic sentence/phrase generator), so far at least. Eventually, however, this is a potential fringe feature, intended to allow a more living, vivid, individually tailored world that can be unique for each player.

EDIT: It's also part of my honors thesis, so there's that.

My main concerns right now are:
Do errors pop up?
Is my site really slow, or is the constant slow loading on my end?
Are we stressing our SQL database? (Should I build a server and host it on my crappy home internet?)
Are there any glaring features that are missing that need to be added? (right now stuff like an actual working dice roll system is on this list; the functions for the RNG work but I don't have input in yet)
Are there security vulnerabilities?