"Flashy" Walkthrough

Dreamer's Code
Bellring a Member
Report Mistakes/Typos
Report Easter Eggs

About Masterplans
Santhworld: Program
SW.: Game Designer
SW.: Treasure Shoals
SW.: Lorehold
SW.: Nepris
SW.: Trivia
Santharia: Manthria
Nybelmar: Zhunite Pl.
Sarvonia: Icelands

World Map Overview
Distances in Caelereth
Climate Map of Sarvonia
Continent: Aeruillin
Continent: Akdor
Continent: Cyhalloi
Continent: Nybelmar
Continent: +Details NE
Continent: +Details NW
Continent: +Details SE
Continent: +Details SW
Continent: +Politics
Continent: Sarvonia
Lands: Icelands
Lands: +Tribes
Lands: Caael'heroth
Lands: Iol Peninsula
Lands: Kanapans
Lands: Kuglim Lands
Kingdom: Santharia
Kingdom: +Ancient
Kingdom: +Provinces
Kingdom: +Rivers
Kingdom: +Routes
Details: Manthria
Details: Vardýnn
Details: Ráhaz-Dáth
Details: Silvermarshes

Create Beasts
Create Plants
Create Races/Tribes
Create People
People Nomenclature
Create Places
Create Gods, Myths...
Create Spells/Magic
Create Library Entries
Create Misc. Stuff

Reserving Resources
Arbaon Pictures
Bard Judith Pictures
Eratin Pictures
Faugar Pictures
Grunok's Pictures
Ingeborg Pictures
Isilhir Pictures
Koldar Pictures
Linda Tso Pictures
Quellion Pictures
Quellion Pictures II
Shayan's Pictures
Seeker Pictures
Sheil Pictures
Sheil Pictures II

Proverbs & Sayings
Styrásh (Elvish)
Thergerim (Dwarvish)
Kuglimz'Seitre
Kh'omchr'om (Orcish)
Trollish

[Kareesh Valendar]

Like....instead of coming up with words for them to say, we put our (or rather our character's) words. Well, this would only work for those of us still here, but yeah....does that clear things up? Also it would give everyone a chance to help out and make it feel more...uh...personal, I guess.

[Artimidor Federkiel]

Hmmm... Still don't know what you mean, Kareesh - can you give an example?

I guess we have to distinguish also between the two different ideas mentioned above.

a) What Jonael obviously tries to plan is a dialogue as part of a Santharian introduction movie. Here the dialogue would be completely guided and you won't see a lot of characters integrated, just a few basic ones - at least as far as I understand it.

b) I have proposed a completely different concept, and it would be an own independent movie, though much more flexible and expandable, offering the chance for masses of characters being part of it. It would go way beyond an introductory movie, while the concept remains relatively simple.

Both movies have very different requirements and possibilities. As Jonael tries his hands on a) I could try to experiment with b) on the side and see how workable the concept it is.

[Jonael Tomeskrift]

Yes, definetly there are two different ideas above. The a) on is Artimidor on his own. Since it is just a trial, to see how it all works out.

It would be great to see how you get along with yours Artimidor, and once you have something set up, Id be glad to take a look at it and work on that too (you see, Im still not 100% sure about how your idea would work. Once you work a bit on it though, Im sure Ill get more of the picture)

In general I think it would be good to have the small "artimidor conversation only" project done, which shouldn't take too long, and then once we have that, and hopefully more people are interested in this sort of project, and they will have gotten a feel for it all, we can pick up on your b) option wherever you will have gotten up to Artimidor. Sound reasonable?

[Artimidor Federkiel]

Well, it's not much yet, but the important thing is to try out the techniques... See here. This movie loads the picture and the text from external files, so that's not much of a problem, and a first step is made... But if one picture and one text can be loaded, we can theoretically let masses of texts and pictures load - if we can make the connection between user and display work. So now the rest will only take years...

[Kareesh Valendar]

Hm....*thinks of how to explain her point* Let's see....for instance, when a person wants to talk to the Artimidor character, the words that he speaks would have been written by Arti himself. Or, if someone wanted to ask Bard Judith about Dwarves, then the words used would be "hand written" by the great bard herself.

Does that make things clearer?

[Artimidor Federkiel]

Yeah, that's the whole idea, isn't it? 

Artimidor will write the answers to the Artimidor questions, Bard Judith to the Bard Judith questions, Gean to Gean's keywords and Kareesh to Kareesh's. Additional characters are also possible. At least the possibilities will then be there to do that, nobody will be urged to write something But whoever wants to breathe more life into his/her Santharian alter ego should be able to alter and expand the texts at will.

Only thing I already see coming is: The pictures included in this dialogue thingy would need to be unique Santharian art, as it will be part of the site then, and we cannot use material where we don't have explicit permission. But first we need to clarify the technical stuff anyway, and I've only just made a small, but important step.

[Jonael Tomeskrift]

I asked around about havign your idea realised, Artimidor, and apparently the commentary didnt seem too positive. It would involve quite some time and programming.

I like the idea of having different people tell you about diefferent things though. Thus, wouldn't it suffice to just have the different characters and their text in a flash file all together? Programmign a search function that will go look for external documents doesnt seem too easy.

What we could do is have is a scenario where the characters and the user lead a prgrammed conversation but with a wide variety of options and various areas, and then within the posts have links to the corresponding entries in the santharian dream. EG:

<After having selected artimidor's figure, a conversation with him is started (others will appear in the room too for other areas of expertise)>

Artimidor: Yes, Santharia is filled with multiple beasts of all sizes and forms

User: [(a)] Oh, sweet. What sort of big monsters do you have? [(b)] Intriguing, have these animals learnt to handle magic similar to the races?

<on selecting [(a)] the user is moved to the frame about larger beasts, in which an explenation about them and links to example entries of large beasts will be, so that on pressing the linked name of the beast, Internet opens and the entry of the respective beast from the compenium appears.>

<on selceting [(b)] similar process happens, except that the user is transfered to a frame with information about magical creatures. Once again with links>

(the conversation doesnt have to end there though, the information within each of the frames will be structured in such a way that the conversation can lead on to different areas. EG:

Artimidor: ... however not all large creatures live on the lands of santharia. Yes, some of the fercest beast house the dark waters of our oceans

User: (well basically they then get to choose to continue to sea monsters, etc...

(ofcourse within every frame there is then an option to return to a main point of conversation so that they can return backwards whenever they want.

****

All this text and info would be kept within a single flash file, which due to its dimensions and such I dont htink should exceed to be a very big size.
This would take away the problem of having to program hardcore, and still allow for differnet people to appear, each representing their area of expertise.

[Artimidor Federkiel]

I object, Jonael - I guess it's actually quite simple. Even though I've asked nobody yet, as I don't know anyone with proficient Flash skills. As you can see in the example above, picture and text are already loaded in this example from an external file.

There's only very few to code "hardcore". Stringing a few variables together I think I can still manage with the little knowledge I have (and even with Flash 5 I use!). The key idea is to make it completely developer independent, you know. Otherwise it will stay a singulary effort - the movie is completed and will remain unchanged. The innovation is to give it in the hand of the role players - they can do what they want, send me a simple textfile, and voilá, their character can talk instantly like a barmaid who cannot keep her mouth shut. Give me some time and I'll talk to you over a completely dynamic Flash movie that doesn't need to be predefined. 

[Jonael Tomeskrift]

Sweet, sounds cool enough! 

I sent you a flashfile with what I thought could be used as a layout ^^ Hope its alright (some modifications obviously still needed, due to limited graphics available)

[Artimidor Federkiel]

Ok, guys... While Jonael's flashfile for some reason doesn't work, I've made some more progress on the dialogue thingy, just to have a few tiny thing to play around with and give you an idea and a feeling how it will work.

I've substituted the file above, so just click this link to see the new version.

Now you see a bit more text within a border, below you see on the bottom left a textbox and an OK button to the right. Click in the textbox. It is meant that you put a question word in here and then press OK. This will in the final version change the text displayed above.

At the moment I've implmented a little picture switch option. You can enter the following names and a different picture will be displayed:

gean
ilbeth
terlano
pinn
dala
artimidor or arti

No check for uppercase and lowercase stuff, so "Dala" won't work at the moment, you need to write in lowercases. Anyway, so much for a first preview of today. Hope you like it so far and get a rough idea how it might turn out eventually.

Feel free to resize the movie the way you like, Flash movies always adjust properly.

And the best of all from the programmer's point of view: our Flash file is - all in all - a whole 4 KB in size!  

[Bard Judith]

Oh, what a great idea! I don't know anything about how to produce the technical side but I can talk your ear off - er, write whatever is necessary about my beloved dwarves or how to conjugate archaic grammar or compose a sarcastic poem....

 I wonder if SL avatar faces are copyright or not?  (if you don't understand, don't worry, I'm rambling to myself. I'll go find out and if so.... could be very useful as a 'face' to talk to if people don't have portraits.   Let's see....

[Artimidor Federkiel]

@Jonael: Ok, I discovered what was the problem, why the movie didn't work here - because I simply tried to open it, and if you have Flash installed, the movie doesn't open in the Internet Explorer, but with the allocated Flash program. And as I only have Flash 5 installed, a Fnew Flash file didn't open. Anyway. It opens properly in Internet Explorer now, so here it is for everyone to take a look: Walkthrough Concept II.

Comment: Ideas look nice, though of course it all has placeholder character still. But one can sense the atmosphere already a bit - Would say that the picture we have at the mainframe and which is displayed on top here is unnecessary though, because it's visible on the site and the movie would be displayed within the Santharian mainframe. We'd need pictures though, to go with the movie.

As the dialogues will be displayed pretty much in a similar way as in my Santhtalk movie we could use the same background scroll there, or the same picture border for the character portraits. Maybe Faugar has some time to help out here

I've also uploaded an updated version of the Santhtalk movie, check it out here. Now we're really getting somewhere from the technical side. Recommed to take a look, and be aware that this is still a work in progress with problems here and there, so here are a few things:

- You now see character name and profession to the bottom right.
- You can now lead a little discussion with the Artimidor character. Watch careful for a keyword you might ask him about. It's not that difficult to miss.
- You go to other persons now by typing in "go to" and the character's name.
- You can restart a discussin with a person by typing in "greeting" (temporary).
- Everything is loaded dynamically, no static code in the Flash file. The dialogues can already expanded endlessly by uploading more pictures and more texts.

Known problems so far:
- Always type in words in lowercases, otherwise the Flash probably won't understand what you want.
- If you type in a work the character doesn't understand you get a blank page.
- If you type in "go to" plus a name that doesn't exist, the picture disappears as well.
- You have to click on OK, ENTER doesn't work.
- No " in use yet, this should be changed.
- Clicking on the textbox doesn't mark the text, the text is also not removed at the moment. You just have to select the text and write over it.

Well, check it out!

[Jonael Tomeskrift]

@Artimidor:

+ Nice of you to have solved that initial problem

+ The top image will be removed

+ What I was thinking, is to have the frame where the portraits are in replaced with your system. See, both projects are basically towards the same aim, so I dont see why we shouldnt merge them. One opens the file like in mine, sees the characters standing there (Ill make the hall larger and the figures smaller to fit all the people you mention in your system, and then on selecting the character, your system appears. Ill modify my layout to fit your system ideas.

I'll use the guidelines and the example you posted to modify my layout to fit... I suppose then it would be easiest if you could pass on a copy of the flash-file, so that i can incorporate the graphics, and then you can go on programming and such I guess ^^

Does that sound reasonable?

[Ta`lia of the Seven Jewels]

What walkthrough would you want to use then for the initialpart, Jonael. The one you started in this last example, or the one I wrote ? For I would need to continue it then fairly soon.

[Jonael Tomeskrift]

Well, if yours is the "walkthrough" that currently exists on the site, Talia then no, I think that if I will create a 'front part' to artimidor's idea then it should be much simpler, like in the newest one

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