July 8th, 2017
Nineteen years have passed since the previous work on Le Morte D’Arthur. Much has changed. This time, however, I am returning to Le Morte D’Arthur as the last-chance effort to get my interactive storytelling technology off the ground. Nobody will look at the technology until they can see it operating. Le Morte D’Arthur is the way to do that.
I will not recite the long deliberations that led me to this point. Suffice it to say that the goal is simple: On January 1st, 2018, I shall publish to my advisory group the Le Morte D’Arthur storyworld in whatever form it is. They will evaluate it and each one will write a short essay describing what must be done to raise it to a level of quality sufficient to inspire a modicum of people (a few dozen?) to take up the Storytron technology and begin building their own storyworlds. I will study those recommendations. If I conclude that they can be executed in a reasonable amount of time, I shall do so. If the requirements appear to exceed my resources, then I shall revert to the minimal plan: prepare adequate documentation and place the technology on a site where it will be publicly available, in the hope that some future generation might gain some insights from the technology.
I already have the beginnings of a LMD storyworld from an earlier attempt. They contain only the battle verbs; my task now is to clean it all up and get them running. The first challenge concerns the verb “Join Campaign”; it is quite tedious for the player to accept all those promises. What I’d prefer is a single verb that summarizes the results, as in “Lancelot, Kaye, Galahad, Nimue, and Percival all agree to join you in the campaign.” The flaw here is that there are 16 such characters and only 15 WordSockets in total. I need one WordSocket for the Subject (Fate), one for the verb (join), and one for the DirObject (Arthur). That leaves just 12 WordSockets. Yes, I could split it up between two sentences, but that’s such a clumsy approach.
Perhaps I could have “immediate joiners” and “delayed joiners”. Some people join the campaign immediately and some simply show up at the rendezvous point. Not sure… but this concept certainly solves the overall problem.
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Well, I have already run into two programming problems. The first is that the original SWAT is designed to operate over the Internet, which slows everything WAY down. I will have to strip away all that code. I did it for Siboot and it was a monster job… I am not at all enthusiastic about trying it again. It was a mess.
My other problem is that the engine designates every Actor as “human = true”. I need to restrict the human setting to just Arthur. This will require some ugly hacks.