CYOA Program

[Smade1]

After reading the cyoa (Choose your own adventure) / interactive fiction link on the other forum I decided to write my own program to do something similiar.

i.e

You see a bottle on a table with the label "Drink Me". Do you:

1. Drink the contents
2. Pour the contents down the drain
3. Worry about being sued by the estate of Lewis Carroll

At the moment it needs a web-server to work but I hope to make a version that will sit in a directory of it's own and not need web services to run.
It could also be used for documenting ideas and other tasks.

I just wondered if anyone would be interested in something of this sort.

 

[AcornaMordor]

That sounds like fun, Smade. I'd be interested, certainly.

 

[Smade1]

Well Acorna I have to confess that part of the motivation was a linked story written by several females on a Yahoo group some time back.

 

[AcornaMordor]

Confess away, I won't think less of you.

 

[Smade1]

That was the confession. I like stories about females tickling females especially written by females. I suspect that makes me a proxy lesbian.

 

[AcornaMordor]

Yeah well, does my liking stories about guys tickling guys written by guys make me a proxy gay?

 

[Smade1]

Not really. Like me it makes you a person who has a preference for those type of stories.

 

[AcornaMordor]

1. Jump out of the way and run for an escape
2. Scream like a little girl and hope someone saves you.
3. Do nothing and fall into the bowels of the earth.

 

[Smade1]

Oh well as it's a Tuesday I'll just open another can.

 

[nessonite1]

I was always a fan of Choose Your Own Adventure books and text based games as well. Always wanted to write one like that but never had the time to commit to it. 🙂
Just curious...why would it need to be on a web server to run?

 

[Smade1]

It's written as a cgi script in order to process the html page requests. Doing that through the filesystem is another matter altogether.

cgi

 

[nessonite1]

Ohhh...I don't know much about cgi...it isn't possible to have the cgi and the perl thingie hosted locally?

 

[TheChameleon]

Choose your own adventure sounds fun! ^_^

 

[Smade1]

Nessonite,

All the items are hosted locally on my computer - webserver, script interpreter and the application pages - it's the best way to work.

As the application uses web page requests to write web pages the simplest way to write it was as a web application. It's basically the same thing as this forum -
a browser requests a page with update fields, fields are updated and then the results sent back to the browser.

To work without a web server I'll have to replace the functions with code to do it's job.

Many people are already running web servers they don't know about courtesy of Microsloth. You can easliy check by typing http://localhost into a web browser and seeing if you get anything back.

 

[SF85]

There's one on Josie the Ticklish Pussycat's website.

 

[Smade1]

I'm talking about a program to produce something like that without having to link together hundreds of html files.

I probably didn't explain it very well.

I see what you mean now Ness, once the story is finished it's just a bunch of web pages connected together and will be in a directory. A browser will let you read through the story without any server or whatever.

I'm doing something that let's you write the story without having to code the web links yourself - you just open the page and click on the "add link here" banner and the program (plus webserver) does the linking. You get back the linked pages with your new entries.

It's a bit like here but instead of someone just adding to my post they branch off to other threads and continue from there - impossible to follow in a forum.

From my point of view the end story is just a bunch of connected web pages: a site. To me a "program" has to actually do something new.

The project now has a working title of cyoapy (pronounced "soapy") as it's
written in

python and the output tends towards the domestic opera style of writing.

 

[Cbarton]

I love the idea....