Unit composition

When I finish the current project in Strategic Primer, converting the map to the new format and a higher resolution (as described in the current roadmap), one of my next undertakings will be adding details to units.

Until now, units—as far as the map and the map viewer are concerned—have just been one of several (and an increasing number of) kinds of what I now call “tile fixtures”, i.e. things that can be on a tile. They have a few properties—an owner, a name, a type description—but are really quite simple. But as the game progresses, this isn’t enough, and sticking with this primitive model will make running the game increasingly difficult as the campaign grows more complex. Here are some of the changes to the viewer that I’m thinking about:

First, I should probably add some sort of unique identifying number to each unit, as in my programming language the statement that “these two units are the same unit, but one is different from the other” would be nonsense.

Second, I’ll add the ability to edit units (and other fixtures) to the viewer. I will want to be able to edit units at the end of this list, and gradually improving the editor along with the model is easier than adding an editor to a complicated model after the fact.

Third, I’ll represent a unit as a group of zero or more “workers”—including soldiers, but I can’t think of a better general-purpose term. These will, for the moment, be simple and opaque objects, like units are now.

Fourth, I’ll also let a unit contain other members, starting with animals (primarily for Herders, but also for mounted units, chariots, and the like) and resource caches (for what an explorer might have found and be bringing home), but eventually including any major equipment (most importantly, in the long run, vehicles). Some of these are already in place as tile fixtures, and I merely need to allow them to be contained in a unit; others need to be implemented from scratch.

And fifth, I’ll start making the model of a unit’s contents more complex—adding “statistics” to a worker, for example, but I’m sure there are any number of things I can do.

Any thoughts?

Shine Cycle Précis: The Dragon Returns

The Dragon Returns is the planned fourth book in the Shine Cycle, following Anarchy. Today’s post is a brief introduction to it.

A Year in Review

The year draws to a close; today is in fact the last day of the Christian liturgical year, and the new year will begin tomorrow with the season of Advent. Last year at this time I looked back over the history of this blog in a three part retrospective; today I’ll take you through the past year since that series. (My Thanksgiving post earlier this week serves as my personal retrospective. And as I follow a schedule for my posts, I’ll be following each “department” separately, so this won’t be strictly chronological.)

“Paths of Memory”

Do you remember how we used to walk
From dorm to dorm, through winter’s clouded gloom
Or rarest sunshine’s biting, bitter chill,
Scarce heeding temperature or ice or snow,
Such was our happiness those blissful days?
Ah, fellowship! And oh, such gladsome friends!
Would that those days would come once more again!
Or that we, careless as we were in those days,
Might but tread again those paths that we recall.

Do you remember how we used to sit
At tables set apart, to break our bread
With laughter, child-like fellowship, and fun,
Taking no thought of what the world might think,
Or in the chapel, worshipping with awe
Amid the there-assembled joyful throngs?
Ah, fellowship! And oh, such joy outpoured!
Would that those days would come once more again!
Or that we, careless as we were in those days,
Might together sit at table once again.

The first stanza of this came to me last month, when the weather began to turn seriously cold and reminded me of my college days. I wrote the second stanza earlier this week, to finish it before posting it here.

As always, I earnestly welcome your comments, suggestions, questions, critique, or other feedback about this or any other part of my work. (In other words, if you liked this poem, or you didn’t like it, or it made you think of something, or … please leave a comment to let me know.) If you liked this, you can also read other poems I’ve written here on my blog (starting with yesterday’s archive installment, since the full archive is by now, at over a hundred poems, somewhat daunting); I’d especially like to know which poems you think are my best.

This poem is also posted on WEbook and Google Docs.

“But thanks be to God”: A third reflection

Today is the day designated for public thanksgiving to our Creator for the gracious gifts his divine Providence has lavished on us. Two years ago I wrote at length about many ways he has blessed me over the span of my life so far, and in particular the many people he has brought into my life in important ways for whom (and for which) I am thankful, and last year I continued more briefly, adding blessings which had occurred since the first essay, and those that I had forgotten the first time but remembered in the succeeding year.

As everything I wrote in the lengthy first essay is still true, and would be worth repeating, I urge you to go back and (re)read it. But I won’t repeat those ideas here, since I again have less time to prepare this than I would like.

I begin again with the most important reason to give thanks. I am grateful for the good news of the Gospel, that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst.” That our rightful Lord and Master, against whom we had been in rebellion, came down from heaven to “reconcile us to him by the blood of his cross,” and bound us to him and himself to us by a gracious covenant, sealing it and us with his eternal Spirit.

[It is my only comfort in life and death] that I am not my own, but belong, body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and set me free from the power of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my heavenly Father. In fact, all things must work together for my salvation. Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

I am thankful that this faith has been passed down by, and with the additional witness of, innumerable saints, whose words (such as these from the Heidelberg Catechism) readily allow us to praise him, contend for the faith, and otherwise speak truly and precisely when our own words fail.

I am grateful for another year of life and health, for the small income God has provided me, and for continued ellowship in person with my family and church here, and with my friends virtually.

I am very grateful for the chance to meet with many very dear friends at our reunion early this summer, and for the hospitality of our hosts, who provided a bed and a roof for me on very short notice. I am also thankful for the chance I and my dad got to go to Evart again, for the first time in a few years, and to see dear friends (and dear acquaintances whom I would like to know better, some of whose names I could not remember even ten minutes) again.

I am thankful for the glory that God again opened my eyes to see in his creation and in the faces of the people I encounter. I’m grateful for the chance to go to several dances this year.

I am again thankful that God has given me words this year, in large quantities with effort in the background work I’m doing for the Shine Cycle, and (with scarcely more than delight) more poetry than I’d hoped for. (As I’ve said before, I consider how often I have poetry come to me, and with how much effort it comes, to be a symptom of my spiritual and emotional health.) I am thankful for the critique and general feedback I have finally begun to receive.

I am thankful for continued correspondence with dear friends. (Though I have months-old emails that I keep meaning to reply to Really Soon Now …) As I mentioned already, I’m grateful for fellowship with absent friends; this correspondence has been a large portion of that, and so a generous contributor to my continued (more or less) happiness.

I am grateful for the communities of Christian fantasy writers and enthusiasts into which I have been drawn, through which my fiction has already begun to improve, in which I have found kindred spirits and excellent writers whose work I have greatly enjoyed reading, by which my faith has been strengthened and my mind sharpened, and from which (I suspect) have come most of my more recent, more talkative (and helpful) readers.

I am thankful for music, and the modern technology that lets us with little talent receive music of exceptional quality (and infinite variety, following our whim) at the touch of a button for no more (incremental) cost than perhaps a slight increase in our electric bill.

I am grateful … but may I be mindful, and as grateful, always, not just on this day a competing ruler designates for the purpose.

“Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who gives us bread from the earth, and who gives us the fruit of the vine. Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who has kept us in life, sustained us, and brought us to this moment.”

And, readers: What are you thankful for?

Poetry Archive: Volume I Issue 12

Since until very recently I’ve had minimal response to my pleas for feedback (though I do thank those of you who have commented so far—the recent response has been quite gratifying) and, more to the point, my archive of poetry I’ve posted here has grown to daunting size, each Thursday I present you with (links to) a smaller selection of my poems. Please read each poem and tell me which poem or poems you liked best (and if possible why).

• “How beautiful the freshly fallen snow!”
• “See how the forest”
• “Her whom I once loved”
• Temperament

Again, please comment and tell me which poem or poems of these you liked best, and if possible why. And any other comments you care to give.

Strategic Primer: Advance Conversion Project

I’ve written before about Strategic Primer‘s beginnings as my science fair project and the “middle period” when I took the rules in various directions without even play-testing them. But over those many years between the first campaign and the current one, I also kept developing more content—more “advances” for the players to discover. What categories I put them in varied, and soon after my attempt to start a second campaign my freshman year of high school or so failed I abandoned my attempt to keep “stats” for them, but I kept piling up more and more advances. Estimating from my current files, I ended up with on the order of over 1500 advances, each with a name, a number, and a description (a sentence to a paragaph in length).

But therein lies the problem. With the changes to the game I’ve made after finally play-testing it again in the current campaign, many, if not most, of those advances will need to be reworked. (Now that we have “Implement” as a category, advances that worked around its absence by being “General Advances” and saying “When discovered, automatically installed on all applicable units” need to change, for example. And some groups of advances draw too heavily and too directly on recent art—novels, films, or games—to be used in a game I hope to eventually sell, or even one I’ll be running with results eventually made public.), and now that the game is finally being played again, the advances need statistics (mostly things like “how much damage does this weapon do, compared to that one”, but also things like “how long does it take one tailor to produce a uniform using this kind of machine”). Beyond that, I also have a large and growing archive of articles and web pages describing technologies that I want to turn into advances.

I’ll be working on this over the coming months and years (getting back to it after I finish the map format conversion I’m working on now …), but I’m posting this in case someone (other than my players in the current campaign … who should be working from their own sources) would like to join me in my effort.

Shine Cycle: status update

In the last month since my last status update, I’ve again accomplished very little, most of which readers of this blog have already seen. I’ve gotten quite a bit of useful feedback from the Writing Circle on the first couple of chapters of An Internal Conflict, though I have yet to make any changes to my local copy, but other than that and (as I mentioned) the various essays I’ve already posted here and a few more poems, I’ve written almost nothing in the last month. Sigh.

With a wee bit of momentum at the moment, hopes for a mild beginning to winter (you may recall that what moved me from being a couple of weeks ahead on this blog to scrambling to get each post up in time was having so much time and energy sapped by my snow-clearing job last winter), and fewer long-overdue letters remaining to write, I have some glimmers of hope of making progress on my writing priorities (which haven’t changed since last month … sigh) in the near future, God willing. But we’ll see.

Best Books: Republic

The next work on my list of books everyone should read is Plato’s Republic.

(First, two caveats. This is one of the few books on the list that I feel belongs there whether it makes enjoyable reading or not—though I think it does. And also, I’ve only read the Republic once, and then not quite the whole thing, so a closer examination could conceivably make me change my mind.)

The question is, why does Republic belong on the list of books everyone ought to read? Perhaps my primary reason is that I think that philosophy is a field that everyone should have an at least minimal understanding of, and that in the study of philosophy (as in most education) we ought to begin (or begin again) by returning to first principles and going back to the beginning, then working our way forward from there—not that we should forget about later critiques until we reach them, but that if we don’t begin as close to the beginning as we can our perspective will most likely be distorted.

(And even if you disagree with my contention that just about every field should be taught in this way, I have a quote I’d like to include here, from one of the giants of twentieth-century philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead:

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.

As well as, of course, Professor Kirke’s repeated muttering that it’s “all in Plato”.)

All right; thus far, I’ve argued that Plato belongs on the list. But why Republic? Especially since much of it—especially the policies it claims the ideal republic would enact, but also the principles upon it founds them—is fundamentally wrong? (As an aside, while I do—as I’ve said—think everyone should read it, I do not advocate an uncritical, unguided, or naive reading.) My answer is that Plato introduces and wrestles with important questions that few subsequent thinkers have considered, and even fewer have dealt with without simply reworking or tweaking his treatment. And there are a few critical ideas that I feel ought to be introduced by someone who appears to have invented them independently of any other tradition, such as the idea of virtue as what a virtuous person does rather than a virtuous person as someone who follows the list of rules in which virtue consists, the metaphor of the cave, and the notion of Forms (i.e. types and archetypes).

Plato’s Republic is one of the books that has shaped the modern world. And while his arguments and conclusions are fundamentally tainted by his pagan worldview, it contains some truth, and can lead a discerning reader to vastly more truth—unlike many more modern books that were or are highly influential but are designed to lead readers astray from the truth. And so I again contend that Plato’s Republic is one of the books that everyone ought to read.

“Passing”

How memory fades fleetingly away!
That night, her visage hung before my eyes—
Or so it seemed—after our final set
Until my lashes closed at last in sleep,
Until excited nerve at last gave way
To weary bones, sore feet, and aching limbs.
But now, her face is painted on the wind—
I but half-catch a glimpse of that fair sight—
Dredged up from my disordered memory—
Before it fades again, beyond recall.

This is a rarity, a poem that I feel is more or less presentable “hot off the presses”; I wrote it yesterday after another not-quite-glimpse. I think—I hope—this poem should stand fairly well on its own, but I should mention that it stands within the context of several of my other poems written over the last several months, all (or nearly all) of which have been posted in this space already.

I always welcome your comments, critique, suggestions, or any other feedback on this poem or any other part of my work. (In other words, if you like it, if you don’t like it, if something “works”, if something “doesn’t work”, if it makes you think of something or someone, etc., please comment and say so!) If you like this, you can subscribe to this blog, which includes one of my poems every Friday; you can also read other poems I’ve written here on my blog (or if that list is too intimidating, I’m posting more manageable subsets, like yesterday’s installment), so you can just start with those); I’d particularly like to know which poems you think are my best.

This poem is also posted on Google Docs and WEbook.