Re: [s-d] What news?

["Daniel Peter Lepage" <dpl33@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>> The House is a collection of Rooms, each of which has its own rules and
>> any number of exits to other rooms. The ideal way to represent it is as
>> a
>> network of boxes or circles with lines showing the connections between
>> them, and I don't think we could do that with tables and divs.
>
> It would be easy to write a GraphViz script to represent the House, since
> it sounds like the House is an undirected graph. (GraphViz produces
> beautiful output in a variety of formats.)

Not only would it be easy, it was easy. A while ago I wrote a dinky little
python script that took as input a bunch of data describing the house and
all the objects in it, as well as URLs for every object, and put together
the resulting image map. The problem, though, was that the data needed to
come from somewhere; mine just had a tiny prepackaged set of dictionaries
with data in them. I'd love to integrate that with some sort of
object-tracking program to handle the data, but that's a much larger
problem to attack.

It occurs to me that what we'd really like to do is store all the rules
and other objects in some format that can be read by a lot of different
programs easily, such as XML files or MySQL tables. If we use the
WikiMedia template system, won't there be all sorts of problems in trying
to do that? Each program would need to extract the right pages from the
WikiMedia's SQL tables, and then parse those pages to extract the template
info, and figure out which fields corresponded to which parts of the
document. Is that easy to do? If not, then maybe we shouldn't be worrying
so much about picking a Wiki client as about finding a good database
manager that makes it easy to access the objects from other files. Or
about writing such a program.

-- 
Wonko


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