Now that the Pirate Kart II is finally out in the world, I've been able to find time once again for MarMOTS; the greatest telnet-based collaborative ANSI art editor and game engine EVER WRITTEN!

I'm still super-excited about MarMOTS even though there are so few people using it (basically me and qrleon, and I don't ever draw anything). And I've decided it's high time to start letting people make stuff besides pictures. Thus I have begun the implementation and design of the scripting language* and its editor! No screenshots yet, unfortunately, but rest assured I'm plugging away. If you have any ideas for textmode games that you might be interested in building in MarMOTS, please feel free to talk about them in the comments and I can make sure that the language comfortably supports your use.

In the meantime, I've deployed a new version of MarMOTS that features line wrapping in more places, like text entry, and "buttons". No more typing off the edge of the screen when chatting, or worrying about making a picture whose name is too long!

* possible names for the scripting language (please vote or supply more suggestions in the comments):

1. MarMOTScript (tm)
2. Marmota (the proper name of the genus of Marmots)
3. Groundhog (the groundhog being a type of marmot, also makes me think of the movie Groundhog Day, which is a plus)
4. Monax (the groundhog's proper name is Marmota Monax, kind of sounds like "monad", but way more metal -- maybe "Monäx"?)

OK, it's about time I released this stuff!

KNPUtil is a collection of 3 utilities for fiddling with Klik & Play games:

1. knpextract: a tool for extracting resources from Klik & Play games
2. knpgen: a tool for generating random "screenshots" from resources extracted from Klik & Play games
3. knpmangle: a tool for generating new Klik & Play games from old Klik & Play games by messing with their resources

KNPExtract and KNPGen have been released before. This release brings much improved image loading times to both tools, as well as support for 16-bit images. KNPExtract also now can generate animated GIFs from animations, extract sounds and music, and provide meaningful filenames to everything it extracts.

Detailed usage instructions are in the readme. The tools are all designed to do something cool if you drag Klik & Play games onto the EXEs from Windows, but KNPMangle especially rewards a deeper understanding of its commandline options.

Enjoy!

Just deployed a great big delicious update!

1. Edit pictures with layers!
2. Fast cursor movement with Home/End/PgUp/PgDn!
3. ANSI algorithms rewritten using Cython for MASSIVE SPEED BOOST!
4. See when pictures were last modified!
5. I think saved ANSI might not look like shit under OS X anymore?
6. Probably some other little nice things!
7. Bullet points!

I just moved a week ago, and I have a good hour every day on the bus to work on MarMOTS now. I cannot stress enough how awesome that is, and how much more progress you're all going to see because of it.

So, MarMOTS has been live for a little over a week now, and you guys have cranked out some phenomenal stuff. It makes me very excited and pleased to see people enjoying my dinky little creation and building cool stuff with it.

My TODO list looks like this:

1. Fix horrible crashing bug that happens when you type a single character
2. notification on chat update
3. Rename, delete picture
4. Display last modified date
5. version control (being able to snapshot a version of a drawing such that you can always come back to it)
6. ANSI Gallery should show drawing name
7. Who's Online (this could even be shown live on the website without logging in)
8. Better HTML generation (either homebrewn or using Ansilove)
9. Keyboard shortcut for switching special characters / colours
10. block select
11. Eyedropper tool
12. Layer support

I'm interested to hear all of your thoughts on what I should work on next. (Obviously the crash bug needs to get fixed ASAP.) What items on that list are important to you? What items could you do without? What items would you add?

So I was aimlessly browsing the internet the other day, and I noticed that someone had updated the MarMOTS homepage.

That's right, bitches: Almost exactly six months after it was first announced, MarMOTS is back online! And Vision #2 has finally been achieved!

To help slow the spread of adoption, you must now log in using your Official Glorious Trainwrecks Dot Com Username And Password. (See this posting for reasons why I'm not keen on getting linked from indiegames.com again anytime soon.)

In addition, you must now download and configure SyncTERM -- I'm not currently supporting Flashterm for technical reasons, as well as social reasons. Other telnet clients may or may not work; the enter key is apparently a tricky issue.

Anyway! Please enjoy MarMOTS, and remember: Be excellent to each other.

Hey, do you like Pickle Wars? Do you occasionally get the repetitive, dreary cutscene music stuck in your head? Well, here, I ripped all of the music from the shareware version into handy-dandy MIDIs for easy use in your Klik & Play monstrosities.

So, I just wanted to talk about MarMOTS a little bit. I'm still working on MarMOTS every so often in my spare time. I had two goals that I wanted to achieve before I put it back online.

Goal #1: User authentication.
This works; you can now login to MarMOTS using your Glorious Trainwrecks username and password.

Goal #2: Saving.
Not explicitly stated, but required for Vision #2 of my 8-step vision, I want to make sure that if I bring the server down, I can bring it back up without everything being lost forever.

This has been trickier than I'd anticipated. I thought I would just chuck everything into an object database, and the de-facto object database for Python would appear to be ZODB. What I didn't count on was that ZODB was not even remotely designed to process the huge volume of changes I would be throwing at i; the way that it saves is to append the new data to the end of a file. In my original plan, this file would quickly be filled up with changes in the cursor blinking status if I saved it all the time.

Of course, then I realized that saving it all the time is infeasable anyway, because that would mean WRITING THE SCREEN TO DISK in addition to sending it over the network. No good.

So I guess I'll implement regular checkpointing, which may mean brief pauses every half hour or something. I'm keeping my eye on POD, but that project is young enough that it makes me nervous about depending on it. I think at this point the simplest thing is to just dump the whole thing to a pickle file and be done with it; I'm pretty sure I'll be able to migrate to a more complicated scheme later.

Maybe goal #3: Dedicated hosting.
MarMOTS has a deliberately inefficient design; I burn lots and lots of CPU so that I don't have to think about cache invalidation. I share the server that Glorious Trainwrecks runs on with lots of other people; the CPU time is not really mine to burn. So I'm thinking the only reasonable solution is to move to my own (virtual) server, where I don't have to care that people drawing ASCII dongs is slowing down other peoples' websites. Of course, I'd want to minimize the time I was spending $20/month solely to host MarMOTS by moving all my shit to the new server, but that's not a project I really want to undertake QUITE yet.

So, yeah, if you guys are excited to play with MarMOTS some more, make some noise in the comments!

MarMOTS is back up, and more awesome than ever.

For reference, here is my 8-part vision. The only difference between the server that is now live and Vision #1 is that the current system is still missing a chatbox. That will not be hard. I'm also hoping to get bright colours up and running soon; have to run some experiments still. Smiley face support is unfortunately absent.

The current whiteboard-specific code is about 250 lines of Python; the whole server / framework is about 1400 lines. I love you, Stackless and Twisted.

It's not much, but it's a start.