@[email protected] As a European, I've never done anything like basing an entire fantasy campaign in Texas. Admittedly only because the players could never find a good time to actually play...
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So, as is traditional for developers we've just spent a while sorting out the blog. But now that it is updated again, we have plans for a series of blog posts on how to make your narrative interactive, and what that changes compared to normal prose.
If you think you'd be interested in that kind of thing, we'll annouce all the #creativewriting and #interactivefiction related blog posts on this account - some of the other posts on the blog are much more technical and development focused, but you're welcome to read those too!
New blog: VisualInk Tutorial Videos
blog.mavnn.eu/2026/03/13/vis...
Basically what it says on the tin, but if you have videos you'd like to see, or comments on what is there, this is a good place to leave them.
Despite learning multiple programming languages over decades, none cause me as much frustration as ELisp. Every single time I want to customize something in Emacs, I think I know how to do it, I can see examples that do what I want to do, I write something and... inexplicable random behaviour occurs.
I actually like Emacs, hugely enjoy using OrgMode and OrgRoam, and like lisps in general but there's just something about Elisp that always manages to catch me out, and it's never anything that feels transferable to the next problem I want to solve.
Okay. That's out of my system. Rant over, and no I am not looking for help at this time.
Annnnd... I ranted this thinking I'd solved the current problem, but now my blog's xml file has a table of contents.
Why? I haven't changed any toc related properties, the config explicitly turns it off, but apparently because I turned off indenting the xml for being too slow I now have a table of contents.
Rant... possibly over again.
Despite learning multiple programming languages over decades, none cause me as much frustration as ELisp. Every single time I want to customize something in Emacs, I think I know how to do it, I can see examples that do what I want to do, I write something and... inexplicable random behaviour occurs.
I actually like Emacs, hugely enjoy using OrgMode and OrgRoam, and like lisps in general but there's just something about Elisp that always manages to catch me out, and it's never anything that feels transferable to the next problem I want to solve.
Okay. That's out of my system. Rant over, and no I am not looking for help at this time.
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@mavnn For nodes with a direct relationship like GUI components, I just connect them directly, either in the editor or in code. Some people prefer to connect and emit all signals in code to make them easier to trace (and probably more code-portable). I haven't had an issue connecting via editor within self-contained components, but the connections can get a bit murky in e.g. complex GUI scenes, and you have to be careful about deleting methods that your IDE says aren't called anywhere.
@[email protected] For things with a direct relationship, yeah, I just wire things up in code (or even within a scene using the editor). I'm more looking at signals that are likely to have several listeners (or varying listeners) or 'central' nodes like the player which I don't want to make a singleton but I also don't want to hand a reference around to every single other node in the game (enemies giving 😜 if they die, shops charging money, etc). Maybe I'm over thinking it, but a message bus the player listens to seems to deal with a lot of these issues.
Okay, #gamedev people out there. I'm building a slightly larger project in #godot for the first time and despite my normal functional programming background Godot seems to be engineered to lean heavily into "original" (i.e. message passing) OO programming. It does it in a really nice way too, so I'm not even too sad.
The question: how have you chosen to connect signals together in your projects? I'm leaning towards a singleton autoloaded message bus, but it feels like something that may have downsides I haven't spotted yet due to my lack of experience with the engine.
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tfw you go to unsubscribe from some email list and you are blocked because the unsubsribe system thinks you're a bot
@[email protected] because insisting on emailing bots is such a well known and successful spam technique.
Actually... I'm now realising that in our brave new llm manages my email world, that may be true and now I'm sad.
@ferricoxide my previous ergo keyboard also had blank keycaps and i liked to joke it was an extra level of security that an intruder would have to overcome
@[email protected] @[email protected] Ah, yes. Blank keycaps and using Dvorak (I needed to learn a different layout as part of dealing with a repetitive strain injury years back) make my desktop virtually unusable to anyone else.
VisualInk allows you to build #visualnovels quickly and easily, but like any tool you do need to know how to use it.
To make getting started easier, we've started releasing short videos (all under 10 minutes) on how to use #ink to build your own #interactivefiction .
We'll be posting more videos, and at higher quality, as we go along but we wanted to get these out as soon as possible after some members of our live course yesterday weren't able to join in due to technical issues. And at that point, it seemed mean not to share them with the rest of you!
VisualInk allows you to build #visualnovels quickly and easily, but like any tool you do need to know how to use it.
To make getting started easier, we've started releasing short videos (all under 10 minutes) on how to use #ink to build your own #interactivefiction .
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Future Daniel asking a follow-up:
"when you said you ran the code and reproduced this issue, did you then "run the code" as in executed the instructions in a real CPU or did you "run the code" as in guessing what it would do based on your half-assed reading of the code?"
@[email protected] where does closing your eyes and visualising very hard fall in this scale? /s
beige.party/users/Anomnomnom...
Having #adhd and currently suffering from #chronicfatigue, this is what I believe the cool kids call a 'current mood'. Assuming current can be measured in years...
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@aeva I hope so
@[email protected] @[email protected] Even if the current AI tech is good enough to write all our code for us (which I don't think it is), we'd still want to teach people to code the same way that we still teach people to add up even though we have calculators. Even if you have a machine to do something for you, knowing how and why to do the thing in the first place is a valuable skill to understand the world around you and use the machine effectively. Having a calculator to do division for you doesn't help if you don't understand that division means splitting up an amount equally.
So... while I think "coding as a profession is going away!" is extremely likely to be untrue with current LLM based AI for both legal and technical reasons, I am absolutely certain that we will have valid reasons to teach people to code for a very long time yet.
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the worst thing about the adhd tax is smarmy people saying "i simply would not have done that" and they can all go to hell
@[email protected] I still get the warm fuzzies each time I remember the day that my wife asked me "why did you forget {x}?" and my teenage son answered for me "Isn't the real question why would the family member with ADHD remember it?"
(Side note: my wife is actually pretty good at understanding the executive function side of my ADHD in general, but having an insanely good memory herself she (ironically) constantly forgets that I forget things)
Some days, the internet is a wonder of technology giving access to opportunities and contacts that would be impossible otherwise.
Other days, the internet is watching two members or your group of five unable to access the video chat that worked fine last week, and two others able to join but not hear anything.
So, courtesy of Zoom's technical issues this afternoon, over the next few days y'all can look forward to some short videos on conditional and non-linear #interactivefiction content in #ink , because I'm not letting people down on the course content just because video chat decided not to work.
Some days, the internet is a wonder of technology giving access to opportunities and contacts that would be impossible otherwise.
Other days, the internet is watching two members or your group of five unable to access the video chat that worked fine last week, and two others able to join but not hear anything.
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Need to tweak some audio settings on my wireless headphones, which are a good few years old now. The lastest version of the software to do so is a 600mb download...
It's taken a good few years, but I have learned that it's always better to write at least two or three implementations of a repeating code pattern before trying to generalize it, because there's always situational tweaks you haven't thought of each time you reuse it.
But it is still so very satisfying to go back after the third, write that general interface, and watch hundreds of lines of code wash away.
So excited! After just one session with Ink, one of our under 11 students has started producing multiple #visualnovels. Bearing in mind he's not been shown anything but 'diverts' and 'knots' (ways to jump to named parts of your script) they are pretty solid. I'm going to be sharing more of them later, but I was excited enough I wanted to share at least one straight away 😁
