oubiwann/myriad-worlds

An experiment in generating worlds, stories, and interactive fiction games.

Myriad Worlds

Table of Contents

• Myriad Worlds
  • About
    • History
    • Vision
  • Install
  • Usage
    • Running a Local Instance
    • Running a Server
  • Project Management
  • Revision History

About

This project is an experiment in generating worlds, stories, and interactive fiction games. It attempts to do all this with a heritage of the classic text-based adventure games -- as well as continuously drawing on them for future inspiration. More than a game engine to power text adventures, this project aims to be a framework for generating worlds -- and stories within those worlds -- that are compelling, dynamic, and unpredictable.

History

This code is based on the adventure engine that Paul McGuire, the author of PyParsing, wrote and then summarized for a PyCon 2006 talk. The first revision in the myriad-worlds repository is his work, 100%.

Vision

Each subsequent revision since then has aimed to expand Paul's original work into something that could support an experiment in authoring interactive fiction adventure games. The initial thrust of this experimentation was:

• object- or connection-based storyline generation (as opposed to room-based) but this quickly expanded into exploring the following:
  • ASCII maps generated from textual descriptions
  • procedurally generated floor plans, city plans, landscapes, etc.
  • how to abstract a world and the narration of its contents in a way amenable to generating new stories from rearranged content

Ultimately, the intent of this project is to be able to create interesting games that are infinitely replayable, due to the variation that is possible.

Install

Myriad Worlds uses setuptools, and is thus pip-friendly (and that's the best way to install the software). The installer automatically downloads and installs the dependencies, so you don't have to. In short, however, it depends upon DreamSSH which is a custom SSH server created with the Twisted networking framework (Python).

If you like to keep a tight control over what gets installed into your system Python packages, we'd encourage you to use virtualenv to install and run Myriad Worlds games.

Usage

There are a couple example games that come with Myriad Worlds, and those that work use the Twisted plugin infrastructure. The plugin setup allows for games to be run in one of several modes:

1. locally (no server starts)
2. single player (a server starts, but there are no shared sessions)
3. multiplayer (a server starts with shared session for all players)

Running a Local Instance

Here's how you start up a local instance:

$ twistd myriad

The default is to run a local game (not a networked game) and to use the "House Adventure 2" as the game. As such, the above command is equiavalent to:

$ twistd myriad --game-type=local \
    --game-dir=./examples/house-adventure-2

To run a differnt came, point to a different game dir:

$ twistd myriad --game-dir=./examples/house-adventure

Running a Server

First, you'll need to generate SSH keys for the game server:

$ twistd myriad keygen

With those in place, you're ready to start the game server:

$ twistd myriad --gametype=singleplayer

That will run the game daemon, and now you can log into the game:

$ twistd myriad shell

Project Management

Bugs are tracked using Launchpad:

• https://bugs.launchpad.net/myriad-worlds

Development plans, if any exist, are managed using Launchpad blueprints:

• https://blueprints.launchpad.net/myriad-worlds

Development tasks are managed using a correlation between blueprints and the issue tracker. Each blueprint has a list of associated "bugs."

Until the projects and tasks get moved into Launchpad, the current project management tool is the TODO file.

Revision History

TBD

myriad-worlds's Issues

Split out ASCII map stuff into separate project

And then, of course, add as a dependency.

Game crashed when looking in chest

Go n -> n-> w
open treasure chest
look chest
And then game crashes with this error:

:>> look chest
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/oubiwann/lab/python/myriad-worlds/.venv/bin/twistd", line 14, in <module>
    run()
  File "/Users/oubiwann/lab/python/myriad-worlds/.venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/twisted/scripts/twistd.py", line 27, in run
    app.run(runApp, ServerOptions)
  File "/Users/oubiwann/lab/python/myriad-worlds/.venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/twisted/application/app.py", line 647, in run
    config.parseOptions()
  File "/Users/oubiwann/lab/python/myriad-worlds/.venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/twisted/application/app.py", line 614, in parseOptions
    usage.Options.parseOptions(self, options)
  File "/Users/oubiwann/lab/python/myriad-worlds/.venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/twisted/python/usage.py", line 266, in parseOptions
    self.subOptions.parseOptions(rest)
  File "/Users/oubiwann/lab/python/myriad-worlds/myriad/game/service.py", line 84, in parseOptions
    runner.runLocal()
  File "/Users/oubiwann/lab/python/myriad-worlds/myriad/game/runner.py", line 41, in runLocal
    game.start()
  File "/Users/oubiwann/lab/python/myriad-worlds/myriad/game/runner.py", line 21, in start
    self.mainLoop()
  File "/Users/oubiwann/lab/python/myriad-worlds/myriad/game/runner.py", line 32, in mainLoop
    self.parseCommand(raw_input(prompt))
  File "/Users/oubiwann/lab/python/myriad-worlds/myriad/game/base.py", line 45, in parseCommand
    return cmd.command(self.player)
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'command'
make: *** [run] Error 1

Update myriad worlds to use new ascii-mapper library