Behold, Duckfang!

(Full scale duckfang.png)

Elvish List

I've started an Elvish mailing list at Google Groups, http://googlegroups.com/group/elvish.

"A forum for J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish languages, specifically questions, answers, corrections, and discussion, especially when prompted by beginners or passing enthusiasts. This list discusses Elvish languages with the humble pretense of authority in service of your curiosity."

Not Middle Earth

Ryan Paul (SegPhault, Gaerdin) and I have discussed a departure from the theme of our so far seven year development track for the M.U.D. game notionally called "Magic of Middle Earth". Stubbing the program with Final Fantasy sprites and music was going to be transitional, supposedly resulting in a Middle Earth themed game. This had to be temporary because of intellectual property issues that would prevent us from ever capitalizing from the project, and possibly get us sued. Unfortunately, a Middle Earth based game has the same problem.

So, we've decided to break away from the enormous body of thematic content that Middle Earth would offer in favor of developing our own conworld for the project, with its own themes, graphics and music.

From there, I'm in favor of developing the game in the Steam-punk (albeit Victorian Science Fiction) genre. Notable others in this genre are Aeronef and Warhammer. I would prefer to meet them half way with a largely fantasy, mediaeval world highlighted with sparse acts of technological wizardry like zeplins. Deep down, my only desire is to have a zeplin or airship.

elf.png

Codish Mailing List

There's now a Codish Mailing List to supplement the Wiki Page.

Codish

Most computer programs employ English for keywords and names. However, I'm sure that langlubbers and programmers agree, English is poorly suited for the task. For example, adjunct phrases in English titles are "specific to general", like "Input Stream" and "Output Stream" rather than "general to specific". Programmers prefer to group names by their equivalence classes (for example "Stream"), which lexical sorting would do if only our titles were "general to specific", like "Stream Input" and "Stream Output". Programmers also prefer to have exhaustive and "orthogonal" equivalence classes, which in English, usually require creative application of disparate terms like "push", "pop", "shift" and..."unshift". Programs also abhor ambiguity, with which English is replete. Hackers also love brevity, which often leads to additional ambiguity.

I propose "Codish", a standardized mutilation of English for the purpose of making computer programs more consistent. The Codish vocabulary should meet needs in most languages, providing unambiguous and exhaustive terms for particular contexts. Codish would be targeted at language designers and library writers. Here's my violent attempt to start a discussion about such a language. I posed this topic to the Constructed Languages Mailing List.

Blue vs Red

For symmetry, I've made a Black Mage stub graphic for the blue team in the M.U.D. project.

The last image is the PNG. I parodied a graphic off Eight Bit Theatre The original image probably belongs to Square-Enix.

Red vs Blue

Shawn Tice and I developed a random maze generator for the M.U.D. project. The purpose of our design was to generate a closed world of arbitrary size, where all rooms are accessible from any other.

We restricted the world's shape to square with sides that measure as powers of two. That way, we could recursively generate the world with the following rules:

1. for all rooms larger than a unit room (1x1)
1. the room posesses four rooms, one in each quadrant
2. the room posesses four exits that are either passable or walled
3. any exit that is passable may be divided in half, closed in by a wall on either side
4. between each quadrant is a partition
5. at most, one partition is a wall
6. all other partitions are passable, guaranteeing that all quadrants are accessible by at least one path.
2. for all rooms
1. all surrounding partitions are walls if they do not lead to a room

Here's how one maze turned out:

The numbers represent the width of each room in the following diagram. Each successive maze is a more detailed version of the previous.

For the purpose of testing, we'll probably populate this maze with two warring clans, Red versus Blue. I doctored an image off of Eight Bit Theatre with Macromedia Fireworks for the purpose. For kicks, I made the layers functional.

The first image is the PNG. The original image probably belongs to Square-Enix.