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First proper version of Tarupaja

Tarupaja, what is that? Well, it a small side-project I've been working for quite some time. It packs together an editor to write interactive fiction, and a story reader. There is also a browser-based version of the story reader. There is also a small example story called 'Lakeside Quest' - it is not much, and it is mainly written to demonstrate the functionality of the Tarupaja story engine. So, my humble wish is that over time you people could write stories of your. If you'd like to have your story published on the Enormous Elk site just contact me. And if you have bugs to report or suggestions to make feel free to send a message to me.

Oh well. For a few months I had this feeling that 'Tarupaja is almost completed, just a little bit of polishing and soon I can publish it!'. As I went on with that 'little bit of polishing' I kept on constantly noticing new little things which I wanted to get done or fixed before a public release. And sometimes those small little things took more time than I had estimated. Today I finally got all the necessary things done and decided to publish the project. I've been developing on linux, so I booted a laptop running windows and started compiling a windows version. That went rather smoothly, just a quick test running the software and ... uh, and there is a memory leak! After an hour of bughunting I found the issue and applied a quick-but-not-so-pretty fix. But that will do for now, I can improve it in the future.

As typical for me, I'm often interested in functionality and data structures - the UI and the style are rather minimal. And I hope to get to improve the looks, once I'm sure everything works the way it should work. So, if you are interested in interactive fiction, take a look here. At the moment there are Windows (64-bit) and Linux (x86-64) versions, both distributed as zipped folders without any fancy installer / packaging. The Windows version ships with sqlite3.dll - on Linux I'm assuming you have sqlite3 installed, as most linuxes do that by default.

Getting ready for the public release.
Getting ready for the public release.
The browser-based reader.
The browser-based reader.
tags: 
diary
programming
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Comments

Glad to see this being released. I'll check it out. :)

HOORAY!!! Cheers, Erkka. I've had this in the back of my mind for months now, wondering if or when you'd release Tarupaja. Downloading now. I've used Twine for years, but there are things about Twine which are really frustrating and rigid. Thanks!

I hope there aren't fatal bugs and it works OK on your end.

Yup, for a few months the story reader and the example story Lakeside Quest have been ready and waiting to get published. And the story editor has been functional, too, as I've used it to write the Lakeside Quest. But I wanted to make the editor a bit more user-friendly, writing help files and adding some convenience features. And then there has been the usual - repeated test-runs, spotting minor bugs and fixing them. All of this took somewhat longer than I was hoping for... So I'm glad that we finally have the first proper public release =)

I deliberately wanted to publish a version which isn't yet labelled 1.0 but less. As I hope to get used feedback, criticism and suggestions which I can consider when implementing the features I've planned. So, the version 0.8 might well be somewhat rigid and frustrating - but the good thing is that at this stage of development we can still do something about it =) For example, I didn't give NPCs ability to move around, as I thought that maybe other people could come up with clever suggestions on how to best design the logic behind NPC movement.

And maybe I could take a look at Twine, too =)

Hi Erkka,
I've been meaning to reply and advise of a fatal bug I've encountered, but have just been so busy with work and life.
So, I'm on Windows 7 64bit and another computer of mine is on Windows 10 64bit. Both throw this same error. I start a new story, add a "beginning" place which the system assigns as "0". I go back to the Metadata tab and fill in the pertinent information, and upon clicking "Save" the following error window pops up:


TSQLite3Connection : UNIQUE constraint failed:
places.id.

Press OK to ingore and risk data corruption.
Press Abort to kill the program.

The program crashes regardless of choosing OK or Abort, and you must tell windows to stop the program.

Hopefully this is somehow helpful as an error report.

If I get it correctly, your procedure has been:
1. Choose 'create new story'
2. Give a filename for the story
3. The editor opens up
4. Leave the metadata blank, switching to Places -tab
5. Choose 'Add new'
6. The editor autofills place number as 0, and waits for you to enter the place name and description
7. Save the place, switch back to metadata -tab
8. You fill in the fields, and give "0" for the "Begins at" -field.
9. Press "Save" on metadata, and the error pops up and the program crashes

If so, it is my fault as I didn't think of that beforehand. As, I've assumed that on step 4 the basics of metadata gets filled and saved. And, upon saving the metadata the editor tries to help you by autocreating the place with number you gave in 'begins at'-field. This happens only when you save the metadata for the fist time - later on if you come back to edit metadata it won't autocreate the beginning place for you. So, my error is that when autocreating the place there is no check if such a place already exists, for I blindly assumed that people fill in the metadata first and then go to adding places.

The obvious remedy is that if you don't create a beginning place first, but just fill in the metadata and allow it to autocreate the first place for you, then it should work smoothly from that on. But if I misunderstood your report, please correct me so that I can reproduce the bug at my end.

In any case - thanks for reporting! I'll add further safety checks for the next version.

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