Got in the pool today and did a bit of swimming. The water was pretty cold, and while it was ~85 out it was also windy, but it was nice nonetheless. Then Oz hung out with us in the living room almost all evening! I'm sure that's only partially to do with the fact that dinner was grilled salmon
Joints are still very bad but there's not really anything to do about it but tough it out
Thought the pain wasn't too terribly bad today, and then I moved
Man if you're gonna blare music for the whole neighbourhood to hear the least you could do is use a player that doesn't have ads
Someone come make me a quesadilla
Yesterday's Lingule taught me how to say 'clitoris' in Swahili
Spent basically all of yesterday bedridden but by the evening I felt better enough to do some physical therapy exercises, so hopefully that will help things improve. Of course there's no position I can sleep in that doesn't make it worse again, so today is not great, and I need to be careful not to sit or lay in a way that's also going to make it worse, but I think I'll be over this in a few days, fingers crossed. It's the usual triangle of neck-shoulder-shoulderblade-area being a bastard
So obviously yesterday I didn't do much, though among the things I did do was finally get around to investigating Dendry and Dendrynexus.
Backstory, summarised courtesy of a chatlog:
As for Failbetter, they made Storynexus, the thing I wrote what exists of SnowRPG on
Maybe a year after unrolling the engine they decided they were unsatisfied by how unsuccessful it was and stopped actively developing it
Shortly after that they were disappointed in its lack of growth and put it into "maintenance mode" - no bug fixes
(This is why I stopped working on SnowRPG there - couldn't justify encouraging people to play a buggy game I had no way of fixing)
A couple months ago they released a notice that there would be an announcement soon on the future of StoryNexus
Today they made the announcement - only a few diehard fans are still using it and they can't justify keeping it running given that, so they're going to be taking the site down in the near future and ending Storynexus entirely
(As an aside, the rat-trading game is incredibly popular for what it is, I see people talking about it who have no connection to Fallen London or Storynexus from time to time)
Yeah, and at every turn they're framing it as them being disappointed in us
We didn't make it popular enough for them
And on that note? It was never "Maybe if it gets popular we'll come back to it"
But it sure was always "Well, you didn't make it popular while we were gone, and the user base keeps shrinking for some reason, so we have decided we're not coming back"[...]
I went looking at the storynexus forums to see if there was chatter happening about it going down and haha they left people hanging for months with no response and no replies to emails asking what the hell was going on
I'm honestly still supremely annoyed that they first teased this announcement by saying 'There'll be more news about Storynexus in the first quarter of next year', zero indication of whether it's good or bad news, whether people should be getting excited for Failbetter resuming development on the platform (definitely the implication of that sort of announcement, all things considered!) or if they should be expecting the worst
(Yeah I'm still annoyed by all this (and let me just say as an aside that stuff which came out about one of the developers there a while back did not surprise me and further tainted my opinion of their games))
Anyway, so in short: Years back I was developing a Snowtown game in Storynexus, a platform that subsequently went defunct, leaving me with a lot of work designed for that platform that won't translate easily to a different platform -- I've been rolling around remaking it in Twine but there's so much that would need to be adjusted for that platform, and -- the big one -- Twine has a cap on how big a game can be, and I don't want to put all that work in and end up running into that cap
But a few months ago I stumbled onto this:
And I've been meaning to look at both Dendry and Dendrynexus and see if it might work for me, but kept running into the issue of, there's not a whole lot of documentation for either and what documentation does exist is not, great. But I did get it working last night and in theory can start trying to port SnowRPG into it to see how it all works? It's been so long since I've worked on it that I don't really, understand my own systems anymore and need to re-learn everything. But in theory? Might be able to start working on SnowRPG again?
God I wish Failbetter had just, made their design platform portable to begin with, and then just let it off into the wild for people to make games with. I wish they'd treated us better. I wish they'd had more realistic expectations for their project. It was a really good platform.
You know what the kicker is? Storynexus is still there, all the games are still up (though mostly extremely broken). So apparently not actually all that burdensome to be hosting them, after all.
There was a cat outside this morning (first time I've seen it out there during the day and it's definitely a stray, poor thing) and Cael went Nuts about it, all puffed up and doing the "ououououou" meow
God I'm so tired and braindead today
Hmmmm, the biggest issue I can see from here is the save system -- Dendry (and DendryNexus) provide save slots that players can manually save to and load from on any screen, which is a problem because a: I don't want players being able to save scum, and b: It doesn't load anything automatically and I want it to drop returning players directly into their continuing game instead of on the new game screen. I don't know if I'll be able to do anything about either of those...