OK, this has got to the be the geekiest entry in this series to date, as well as the most specific, as it involves an obscure point of Tk programming that will be of interest to almost no one; on the other hand, there are some reflections on player controls that might be of interest to a broader audience.

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Just for fun, I’ve made my latest version of Ramble available for download at the new Ramble Home Page. It’s available as a Mac OS X application, a Windows executable, and for the die-hard Tclers in the audience, a starkit. If you decide to take a look at it, be aware that it’s still in its infancy, and isn’t much of a game yet; it’s more a preview of coming attractions. The game begins immediately when you start the application; it ends when you die or win the game. In either case, you’ll need to quit the game and start over in order to play again.

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I spent the evening working on Ramble instead of writing about Ramble, and now I find I’m out of time. But I’m hoping to put the initial (very, very simple) version on-line sometime in the next couple of days. Hold your breath!

Via Lynn Sislo I find this truly bizarre gallery of images–one artist’s conception of the skeletal structure of a variety of well-known cartoon characters. Charlie Brown is here, as is Marvin the Martian, Tweety Bird, Fred Flintstone, and a number of others; but the real eye-openers are the Powerpuff Girls. This must be seen to be believed; you simply can’t imagine it on your own.

On our Peter Lovesey page, I give him the tagline “diamonds,
not so rough”; I sometimes wonder if “red herring monger” would be more
precise. But be that as it may.

I first encountered Lovesey’s books shortly before this book came out,
and I confess it stopped me in my tracks; it’s only recently that I’ve
begun reading his Peter Diamond novels again. And all this without my
even reading it, mind you; just reading the flyleaf was enough to put me
off. Why? In this book, Peter Diamond loses his beloved wife Steph.
Although she hasn’t had a major part in any of the books, she’s had a
persistent and important role in all of them–she’s Diamond’s anchor, his
prop and stay, the thing that keeps him from going nuts, his island of
peace. And in this book, she dies…and Diamond has to deal with it.

I hate that.

Having read the flyleaf I put the book back on the shelf
and said, “Well, I think I’ll wait for the paperback of this one…and
maybe even longer than that.” I hadn’t even read enough of the flyleaf
to find out how Steph dies; just the bare fact was sufficient.

And for quite a while, the only Peter Diamond books I saw on the shelves
were this one and some I already had. About a month ago, though, I found
two others nestled on the bookstore shelf next to this one, and decided
that it was time to bite the bullet and get on with it, especially since I
could begin with the other two books. I didn’t know at the time whether
they were written before or after Diamond Dust, and it didn’t
matter; it was all insulation.

You’ve perhaps noticed that I haven’t said much about what’s in the book,
or how Steph dies, and I’m not going to. I’ll just say that parts of it
were indeed painful to read; Steph’s death is a bad thing, bad for
Diamond, and bad for us, and knowing that, I’d guess, Lovesey doesn’t rub
our noses in it. He portrays Diamond’s grief simply and poignantly
without wallowing in it.

The mystery that follows is as intricate and surprising as anything else
of Lovesey’s I’ve read, with red herrings galore, and I found the ending
perfectly satisfying–which was yet another surprise.

But I rather suspect that if I’d tried to read it when it first came out,
I’d have had more trouble. Living with the fact of Steph’s death for a
couple of years lent me some needed distance.

It might seem odd that I’d get so worked up over a mystery series, and
indeed I’ve probably overstated my dismay. It wasn’t heartbreak that
caused me to put this book back on the shelf a couple of years ago, it
was the wish to spare myself an unpleasant read. But either way, it’s
a tribute to Lovesey’s skill.

The Summons, by Peter Lovesey

In the first Peter Diamond mystery, The Last Detective,
Diamond ends the book in grand style by resigning from the Bath CID. He
spends a fair amount of time unemployed and underemployed until this book,
when the Bath CID needs him again. It seems that a guy Diamond put away for
murder has escaped from prison and kidnapped the Chief Constable’s
daughter, and the only one he’ll talk to is Diamond himself. He claims
to be innocent of the murder, and he wants Diamond to prove it. The CID
is interested only in capturing the guy before the Chief Constable’s
daughter is hurt, and they want Diamond to sweet-talk him; they have no
intention of re-opening the case.

But Diamond’s an honest man; that’s why the escapee is willing to work
with him. And though it seemed like an open-and-shut case at the time,
and still seems like one now, if Diamond says he’ll look into it, look
into it he will, whatever the top brass say. And as he’s still a
civilian, they can’t stop him….

The average Lovesey novel has some delightful twists, turns, and
surprises, and this one is no exception; though, honestly, I’d kind of
like to see a novel in which Peter Diamond isn’t going it mostly
alone.

Visibility: What can the player see, and when can he see it?

The simplest answer is everything, all the time–what I’ll call complete visibility. The entire world (or, at least, the entire level) is visible all at once. You can see your character, all terrain features, traps, treasures, monsters, etc., et al. This is dead simple to implement (provided the world is small enough to fit on the screen all at once), but generally speaking it’s boring. A big part of the fun of playing a tile-based game is exploring the game world, and that requires limiting visiblity.

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OK. So I’m nerdlier than Ian Hamet. I’m a UNIX programmer, what did you expect?

In this book we find Peter Lovesey’s irascible yet big-hearted detective, Peter Diamond, in an amusing yet silly book that’s a cross between a police procedural and a puzzle mystery from the golden age of Christie, Allingham, and Marsh. It concerns a small literary group that meets periodically in the crypt of the church of St. Michael with St. Paul in the city of Bath to discuss murder mysteries–or, as they prefer to say, “crime fiction.” The group’s name is “The Bloodhounds of Bath”, and its members are a delightful group of eccentrics.

There’s the snobbish and very proper Miss Chilmark, whose ancestors have lived in the vicinity of Bath for five-hundred years, and who believes that Eco’s The Name of the Rose is the pinnacle of the art. There’s Milo, an older bachelor of the tweedy variety, who delights in the puzzle mystery. There’s Jessica the art gallery owner, who specializes in female investigators. There’s Rupert the repulsive, a decayed intellectual who delights in stirring things up and claims the group should read nothing but true crime. There’s quiet Sid, a John Dickson Carr fan, who suffers from painful shyness and comes to the group on the advice of his therapist. And finally there’s Shirley-Ann, newcomer to the group and to Bath, who has read almost every mystery ever published and has them all on-tap in her head.

And then a famous stamp is stolen from a Bath museum…and then reappears under mysterious circumstances. Clearly, it’s time for the Bloodhounds to figure whodunnit. And then one of the Bloodhounds is murdered–and the body is found in a locked room. There’s only one key, and its owner has an iron-clad alibi–he was at the police station throughout the time in question, and he had the key with him.

And in steps Peter Diamond, in best police-procedural fashion, to catch the murderer, and the conventions begin to run together a bit…. And if you think Lovesey had a lot of fun blending the two styles together, you’re right. In fact, I’d been a little disappointed by the ending; but now that I think about it, given the problem Lovesey set himself the murderer could have been no one else. Nice, very nice.

I want to talk about random maze generation, but I’ve got some more infrastructure to get out of the way first. This essay is about the Tcl implementation of Ramble rather than the game design, so pass on by if the code doesn’t interest you.

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