Chromecide.com

With the new baby due in a little over 6 weeks, I have had to take a long hard look at the projects I have in their various states of incompleteness.  Everything from horror movie scripts to iPhone apps.  Some are easier to drop from the list than others, but with my personal time about to be slashed, it is something that needs to be done.

The iPhone apps are easy, for the simple reason that Apple have made it too hard and too expensive for me to “get into the game”.  Add to that the fact that even if the app is approved, they could pull it any time, and the decision is made.

The horror movie scripts, well script, one is little more than an idea.  Tougher.  Especially the script for “The Shed”, a script I bought last year from a guy called Alex Whitmer.  While I’d love to be able see the script turned into a Feature length film and my full vision created, it is just not going to happen in the near future, so that is going to be dropped as well.  I’m actually thinking of releasing the script under an Open license, maybe one day I’ll be able to watch someone else’s vision of the script.

One I’m really not ready to let go of, even though nothing has progressed in FAR too long, is OpenEmergency.com.  I think the idea is good, but again, time is against me at the moment, so it will have to move to the back burner for a while.

The rest are minor ideas or projects that I feel can wait indefinitely so I’m not too worried about those.

This has left me with only one item on my list. Actually two, but they each rely on the other so I’m counting them as.  These are “One Man’s Life Work” a constant and persistent fictional universe and “Flux Singularity” the software to run it.

I’ll be working to consolidate the information on both projects in the next week or so, to help give myself a firmer direction for them.

With the base functionality of Flux Singularity forging along nicely, I have turned my attention to how to deal with the security of the content.  The idea of the system is to be able to have multiple story lines running in a single universe, in a coherent way.  If i didn’t have to worry about who is and isn’t “behind the curtain”, it would be a simple matter of securing the information in one go.  You either have access, or you don’t.

But now that I’m thinking about sharing the system, and possibly the data, it means I need a much more robust approach to content security.  I have been using my own projects as “test cases” against this concept.  I have a couple of stand-alone horror movie scripts I’ve been working on for a while, along with a couple of ARG concepts tied into a much longer running story line.

While the movies, the story and the ARGs exist in the same universe, they don’t exist together as part of a single story line. I don’t want to limit myself in future integration of the story lines, so structuring things in the form of “Projects” or “Folders” simply is not going to work, the solution needs to be far more flexible.

My proposed solution is to instead think of the universe as a “giant stream of information”.  Each project would be an “island” within this stream and users would then be granted access to an island.  Characters, objects and other concepts can then be shared between islands using “bridges”.  This would allow cross-story use of characters etc, while leaving the original content creator in control over who sees what, and what information can and can’t be bridged.  A bridge can link anything from a full object (Character, location etc), down to a single attribute of an object.

A simple example of this is a bridge between one of my movie “islands” with one of my ARG “islands”.  Both story lines, while separate, exist within the same geographical region.  Both story lines require a police officer, albeit in a minor role.  Instead of having to come up with 2 police officers for the universe, I can bridge the officer from one island to the other.  In terms of the overall universe, this would make sense, as both “incidents” in each story would be covered by the same police jurisdiction, so it would not be impossible for the same officer to attend both incidents.  If either story line required more involvement by a police officer, I could then choose to either create another officer, or expand the role of the original officer in one island, while he would remain a minor role in the other island.  At the completion of his role within my individual story lines, I could then release him into a “public island” which would form a repository of assets that can be used by other people in their own story lines.

I believe this concept of islands and bridging will encourage my primary goal of Flux Singularity.  To create a constantly changing and persistent universe and, as a side effect, would make fleshing out the history of the universe more collaborative.

Shattered.  Just as I was about ready to hit the go button on the web site I was going to use to test the site maintenance features of my ARG Management system, epic hardware failure.  20-20 hindsight says I should have checked the hard drives of the second hand machine I was using, that was shipped through standard post,  BEFORE I installed anything that was semi-production ready.  I’m good at that sort of thing.

So now I’ll have to hold off till pay day so I can get some replacement parts.  I think I have something I can use in the mean time, but it’ll take a couple of days for me to get the time to get everything re-installed and re-configured.

Luckily I have everything backed up in an SVN repos, so no stresses there.  At worst I have lost maybe half a dozen notes I had put in late last week, but I’ve mostly been working on system dev as opposed to content, so *phew*.

In terms of progress for the Management software itself, I have been concentrating solely on the web site maintenance side of things, and it is pretty much complete. I have upgraded the way that templates are created and rendered to provide some more flexibility in site design. I have almost finished the web site editor, with only saving content items being left to implement.

That’s why I’m so shattered about this server dieing. I have a site almost ready to go. The template needs a few tweaks, most of which are stock photos, but I have to wait for pay-day for those. A little more detail in the content and it’s all good. So it would have been a perfect test bed for the system. I have events set up to automatically release “new” content in the future. And now I’ve been stalled just as I round the last bend. Oh well, another lesson in patience i suppose.

Story writing. A lot harder than I remember it being ( in grade 6). Sometimes it can be hard just to progress a couple of sentences. Thinking about it now I should probably have started with a firmer idea of some of the details, but all in all I’m fairly happy with how it’s going. I never proclaimed to be the next Shakespeare, but I’m having fun with it.