[Reality] GutenBook

Glyph Lefkowitz reality@twistedmatrix.com
Tue, 18 Jun 2002 03:11:26 -0500 (CDT)


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From: David Sturgis <dave@dcit.com>
Subject: Re: [Reality] GutenBook
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2002 12:47:11 -0500

> On 17 Jun 2002 12:16:57 -0400
> Christopher Armstrong <radix@twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
> 
> > Perhaps. After looking over some books for a while, it seems the standard is
> > not as clearly-defined as I hoped. :( So the "information retrieval system"
> > may just be comprised of a regexp shwacking the (super-long) header of the
> > text and returning the body. I'll show you once I have the implementation :)

Let's not get too standards-happy here, especially before seeing any sort of
generalizing patterns.  Twisted is a fairly generalized "information retrieval
system" by itself -- there are many, many varying kinds of structure and levels
of trust that one might want to impose on information being read into the
Reality system.

> That would be really handy... Having an Alice in Wonderland/Jabberwock based
> puzzle/area that included a complete copy of the derivative literature as an
> extra hint would be pretty neat. Especially if creating that in-game book
> didn't involve retyping the entire contents of said literature into a GTK
> faucet window.  ;-)

For those of you who have heard the plans for the New Divunal, this is
*exactly* the sort of environment I described for the lobby-esque area :).  I
don't know if this was intentional or not, but I can't remember if I mentioned
this to either Chris or Dave :)

> And that could also be useful for getting large amounts of externally written
> text (like the "children's book" from Inheritance) into Reality-book form
> without too much extra work.

Well, as Chris said, the Gutenbook data-format standard is kinda sucky.  If we
were going to write lots of external text, we'd probably want certain pages of
the book to be special, for example.  The King in Yellow would have to get
kinda twitchy after the first act, and you shouldn't really be able to turn
pages in the Necronomicon willy-nilly.  Also, it may be necessary for certain
sources of data to actually store all the data in a synchronously-accessible
format, but for others, it may be quite acceptable to keep an fp in memory that
you can seek() on.

Speaking of external data-sources; I seem to recall that Allen wrote a hack
that got the gold/dollar exchange rate and displayed it on a message board in
the demo center at one point.  Anybody know if that still works (or even
exists?).

-- 
 |    <`'>    |  Glyph Lefkowitz: Traveling Sorcerer   |
 |   < _/ >   |  Lead Developer,  the Twisted project  |
 |  < ___/ >  |      http://www.twistedmatrix.com      |

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