Before I get into the nitty-gritty of tonight’s bug-squishing and feature-tuning session, I have to talk about how I spent my evening — watching Macabre Theater with the legendary Ivonna Cadaver! I first caught one of her shows back in the early 2000s on our local Fox affiliate, and I’ve been a fan ever since. Thank goodness for dual monitors — one screen running Macabre Theater, the other humming along with Visual Studio. Multitasking at its spookiest!
Tonight I chased down the last of the pesky bugs haunting Retro42BBS and rolled out a few long-overdue enhancements to the message-board system. There’s still more to refine, but for now I’m turning my attention back to DM42.
Progress in the Dungeon
Between grad-school assignments, I’ve been hammering away at the new game/rule/battle engine for DM42. I underestimated just how much code it would take to encode the full Basic Fantasy rule system and get it all singing in harmony, but progress is solid.
If you’d like to help build the world of Tharendell, swing by Tharendell.com and submit your own location idea! Every new corner of the realm helps shape the stories to come.
RAG and the Rise of the NPCs
Next up on the roadmap: adding RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) smarts to the NPCs. I’ve already built out a rich set of locations with vivid descriptions; now it’s time to vectorize those entries and wire up the Python backend so our characters actually know the world they live in.
Enter the Queen of Macabre
While watching Macabre Theater tonight, inspiration struck, what if Ivonna Cadaver herself became part of Tharendell’s lore? Imagine a shadowy underworld ruled by the Queen of Macabre, where drow, undead, and the cursed pay tribute. I’ll be reaching out for permission to immortalize her as an NPC soon.
Happy Computing,
Babble Baz