Current Events on Derkomai
Thursday, March 21, 2024
I've submitted some articles for the 2024 Worldbuilding Awards. I have an article that links to all of them here: Entries for 2024 Worldbuilding Awards. There are a lot of really great worldbuilders, artists, and authors that participate in the Worldbuilding Awards, so I don't expect to win anything, but participating at least exposes Derkomai to more people, and maybe some will be interested in reading more or developing campaigns or adventures on Derkomai, and that's good enough.
I'm still working on the mapmaking software that I started. It's going reasonably well, but not as quickly as I would have liked. I'm doing quite a bit of refactoring as I learn more and develop more features. As I add new features, I often discover that my initial implementation of other features wasn't optimal, so I go back and rework the software. I'm in the midst of a fairly big rework effort right now. Hopefully, I'll have that done in the next day or so. My plan right now is to make the project completely open-source and free for anyone to use. In the relatively near future, I will be uploading and maintaining the source on Github or perhaps another repository. If anyone is interested in this project, please let me know. I will definitely need some help when it comes time for alpha/beta testing.
Pete Nelson
Thursday, February 29, 2024
Well, Feb. 29th only happens every four years, so it's an interesting day, just for that reason!
A couple of weeks ago, one of my best friends, someone I've known for almost 50 years, passed away from a brain cancer. So, I've been pretty sad about that, but fortunately, her family (husband, daughter, and others) have been handling it well. I will miss her, for sure.
I'm continuing to work on the mapmaking software project that I started last month (January). I'm roughly six weeks into it. It's been a slow process of figuring out how to implement the ideas I have, but overall, it's been going reasonably well. I'm using the Skia graphics package (used by Chrome and a bunch of other things) for drawing the maps, coding in C#. I haven't used Skia before, so figuring that out has taken some effort. It's definitely faster than GDI+ but somewhat more difficult to use, I think. So far, I've implemented setting a background for the map, ocean textures and color, and painting landmasses (much like how Wonderdraft does it) with coastline effects. I'm working through implementing different coastline effects now (gradients, bands, hatching, etc.). Right now, my landform painting is not quite as smooth as Wonderdraft's, and erasing isn't quite as good, either, so I have to work on that more. I want to figure out how to use the GPU for drawing via OpenGL or DirectX, which should be much faster and smoother. I got it working a few weeks ago, but it was horribly slow, and I don't know why. So, I disabled that for now. I still have a lot of features left to code, so the software isn't ready for public use yet, but I will be looking for people to give it a try in the next few months. If you're interested, send me a message.
For Derkomai, I wrote a couple of articles for the Cabinet of Curiosities, Great Imperial Seal of Taiko Da Song, and The Sacred Imperial Horologium. I think these two items could become part of larger stories in the future!
Pete Nelson
Wednesday, February 7, 2024
I wrote an article for the Cabinet of Curiosities challenge about Asëamacil, otherwise known as "Beneficent," the sword of Halueth Benialir Shuruziat'Athem, Heru Númenost of Ostnúmenoron. Besides that, I haven't done much work on Derkomai, as I've been busy working on developing some mapmaking software. I am hoping to combine the ease of use of Wonderdraft with the power of Campaign Cartographer (not that Wonderdraft isn't powerful). Have I bitten off more than I can chew? Probably. It wouldn't be the first time. I've been working on it for a little over two weeks. I'm making pretty good progress, but I have a long way to go. I'm learning and re-learning a lot about Windows graphics programming, which I haven't done for a long time. This is really the first serious bit of software I've written since I retired a couple of years ago. I've enjoyed writing software for fun again, but it has also been frustrating at times as I've struggled to implement some of the ideas I have. Overall, I think it's going pretty well, though!
Pete Nelson
Thursday, January 18, 2024
I've spent the past week or so working through the Derkomai maps, restyling all of the labels and makers, making them consistent across all of the maps and making them look (I think) much better. I still have work to do on several of the maps, but I think I've made a lot of progress toward making the maps more attractive and more readable. I hope others will think so, too!
Pete Nelson
Wednesday, January 10, 2024
Yesterday, I spent quite a bit of time looking at how maps are presented on WA - the HTML and styles applied to the HTML to create the map displays. My goal was to figure out how to scale map pins and labels as the map is zoomed in/out, within the limitations imposed by WA on how the presentation can modified. WA (wisely) does not allow end users to inject any script into the site, and the CSS that can be added has some limitations. Unfortunately, after digging into the map HTML and CSS and trying a few things, it looks to me that getting map pins and labels to scale as the map is zoomed in/out just isn't possible. Maybe someone with more CSS knowledge can figure it out, but I just don't think it can be done right now. The WA map presentation uses translate/transform styles that are apparently injected onto some elements through script, so it looks like getting the map zoom level via CSS is impossible. Getting the map pins and labels to scale would require support from the WA developers. Perhaps they could inject a class onto one or more of the map elements indicating the zoom level, e.g. "map-zoom-0", "map-zoom-1", "map-zoom--1" and so on. With those classes available, custom CSS could be added to scale or hide the map pins and labels however the world owner wants.
Pete Nelson
Monday, January 8, 2024
The past couple of days, I did some work to make articles, etc. look better. I added a background gradient to the articles, removed some margins, and made some other improvements that I hope make the site look better overall. Today, I began working on the Appleton and Dunton map, changing the markers to circles. I want to think about the markers more. One of my main complaints about the map markers in WA is that they don't scale, so when the map is zoomed way out, they're far too big. Changing the markers to circles or polygons fixes that, but then they aren't very attractive. It's probably going to require some CSS work to make them scale and still look decent. I'll investigate that some.
Pete Nelson
Saturday, January 6, 2024
I'm continuing to work on the Derkomai home page. I got some good feedback from Myth Cross, and that got me started thinking about the home page more. I added a little animated graphic to direct visitors to the "Planetary Intelligence Report," aka the Welcome page, cleaned up and added a tagline to the header image, changed some colors, and made a few other tweaks. Hopefully, I'm making it better, rather than worse. I don't totally trust my artistic instincts, so I hope people will like it and want to learn more about Derkomai. After I installed Campaign Cartographer, I started re-doing the map of Southport with it. It's slow going, and I'm not sure I like what I've done so far. I'll see how it goes. I might end up throwing it away, keeping the Wonderdraft map I started with and working to improve that one.
Pete Nelson
Thursday, January 4, 2024
In my seemingly never-ending quest to improve my maps I downloaded Campaign Cartographer 3+ and the rest of the tools from ProFantasy Software and started learning how to use them. This is one piece of software where the documentation is absolutely needed. It's powerful and complicated, and the UI is...weird. It's way out of date and looks like a (bad) Windows 95 application. The way it works might be intuitive to the designers of CC3+, but it definitely isn't to me. After working with it for a couple of days, I'm starting to get used to it, but I find myself constantly asking why? Why did they design it to work the way it does? I am a software architect and engineer (now retired), and I've designed and worked on many, many software systems, most for very large companies that demanded that their software work right and work well all the time. I've never seen a UI like CC3+'s. It could be so much simpler and easier to use than it is, and I just don't get why ProFantasy doesn't update and streamline the UI. CC3+ is really powerful and has some really cool functions that I haven't seen in any other map-making software, so I think that I'll (eventually) be able to create some good maps with it, but the learning curve is, frankly, painful. Besides CC3+, I've used Wonderdraft, Dungeondraft, Inkarnate, and a few other map-making applications, but I've yet to find one that I thought was really, really good - easy to use, with tons of assets in many styles/genres, and powerful features - that produces beautiful, functional maps (world, region, city, dungeon, floorplan, battle) in a variety of styles. They all have either significant limitations, are weird/quirky, or the maps they produce are not in a style I like. World Anvil is (was?) backing Project Deios, and it looks promising, but disappointing at the same time. The first posts announcing it were over three years ago, and the Kickstarter apparently brought in a fair amount of money, but as of today, there is only an alpha version available. I pre-ordered and downloaded the alpha 0.6.2 version and spent a little bit of time playing with it. It looks cool - maybe the answer to my quest for easy-to-make, great maps - so why is it taking so long to release? Has the project failed?
Pete Nelson
Monday, January 1, 2024
I wrote an article for the New Years Resolutions 2024 challenge reviewing ten articles that other authors and worldbuilders wrote for WorldEmber 2023. They were all interesting, fun reads, but a few stood out. E. Christopher Clark's article on "Edenian Slang" was funny and inspired me to think about slang in the languages of Derkomai. I like reading the work that other worldbuilders and authors create on WA, but I don't do so often enough, so I'm happy for the push that the New Year's Resolutions challenge gave me.
Pete Nelson
Sunday, December 31, 2023
Today I published my last article for WorldEmber 2023. The article was about Mystanidrax te Kinyel, the first Derkorim character I've described. Over the past few days, I've made huge changes to the Derkomai Home Page. Hopefully, it is interesting enough to draw a little more attention to the world!
Pete Nelson
I've submitted some articles for the 2024 Worldbuilding Awards. I have an article that links to all of them here: Entries for 2024 Worldbuilding Awards. There are a lot of really great worldbuilders, artists, and authors that participate in the Worldbuilding Awards, so I don't expect to win anything, but participating at least exposes Derkomai to more people, and maybe some will be interested in reading more or developing campaigns or adventures on Derkomai, and that's good enough.
I'm still working on the mapmaking software that I started. It's going reasonably well, but not as quickly as I would have liked. I'm doing quite a bit of refactoring as I learn more and develop more features. As I add new features, I often discover that my initial implementation of other features wasn't optimal, so I go back and rework the software. I'm in the midst of a fairly big rework effort right now. Hopefully, I'll have that done in the next day or so. My plan right now is to make the project completely open-source and free for anyone to use. In the relatively near future, I will be uploading and maintaining the source on Github or perhaps another repository. If anyone is interested in this project, please let me know. I will definitely need some help when it comes time for alpha/beta testing.
Pete Nelson
Thursday, February 29, 2024
Well, Feb. 29th only happens every four years, so it's an interesting day, just for that reason!
A couple of weeks ago, one of my best friends, someone I've known for almost 50 years, passed away from a brain cancer. So, I've been pretty sad about that, but fortunately, her family (husband, daughter, and others) have been handling it well. I will miss her, for sure.
I'm continuing to work on the mapmaking software project that I started last month (January). I'm roughly six weeks into it. It's been a slow process of figuring out how to implement the ideas I have, but overall, it's been going reasonably well. I'm using the Skia graphics package (used by Chrome and a bunch of other things) for drawing the maps, coding in C#. I haven't used Skia before, so figuring that out has taken some effort. It's definitely faster than GDI+ but somewhat more difficult to use, I think. So far, I've implemented setting a background for the map, ocean textures and color, and painting landmasses (much like how Wonderdraft does it) with coastline effects. I'm working through implementing different coastline effects now (gradients, bands, hatching, etc.). Right now, my landform painting is not quite as smooth as Wonderdraft's, and erasing isn't quite as good, either, so I have to work on that more. I want to figure out how to use the GPU for drawing via OpenGL or DirectX, which should be much faster and smoother. I got it working a few weeks ago, but it was horribly slow, and I don't know why. So, I disabled that for now. I still have a lot of features left to code, so the software isn't ready for public use yet, but I will be looking for people to give it a try in the next few months. If you're interested, send me a message.
For Derkomai, I wrote a couple of articles for the Cabinet of Curiosities, Great Imperial Seal of Taiko Da Song, and The Sacred Imperial Horologium. I think these two items could become part of larger stories in the future!
Pete Nelson
Wednesday, February 7, 2024
I wrote an article for the Cabinet of Curiosities challenge about Asëamacil, otherwise known as "Beneficent," the sword of Halueth Benialir Shuruziat'Athem, Heru Númenost of Ostnúmenoron. Besides that, I haven't done much work on Derkomai, as I've been busy working on developing some mapmaking software. I am hoping to combine the ease of use of Wonderdraft with the power of Campaign Cartographer (not that Wonderdraft isn't powerful). Have I bitten off more than I can chew? Probably. It wouldn't be the first time. I've been working on it for a little over two weeks. I'm making pretty good progress, but I have a long way to go. I'm learning and re-learning a lot about Windows graphics programming, which I haven't done for a long time. This is really the first serious bit of software I've written since I retired a couple of years ago. I've enjoyed writing software for fun again, but it has also been frustrating at times as I've struggled to implement some of the ideas I have. Overall, I think it's going pretty well, though!
Pete Nelson
Thursday, January 18, 2024
I've spent the past week or so working through the Derkomai maps, restyling all of the labels and makers, making them consistent across all of the maps and making them look (I think) much better. I still have work to do on several of the maps, but I think I've made a lot of progress toward making the maps more attractive and more readable. I hope others will think so, too!
Pete Nelson
Wednesday, January 10, 2024
Yesterday, I spent quite a bit of time looking at how maps are presented on WA - the HTML and styles applied to the HTML to create the map displays. My goal was to figure out how to scale map pins and labels as the map is zoomed in/out, within the limitations imposed by WA on how the presentation can modified. WA (wisely) does not allow end users to inject any script into the site, and the CSS that can be added has some limitations. Unfortunately, after digging into the map HTML and CSS and trying a few things, it looks to me that getting map pins and labels to scale as the map is zoomed in/out just isn't possible. Maybe someone with more CSS knowledge can figure it out, but I just don't think it can be done right now. The WA map presentation uses translate/transform styles that are apparently injected onto some elements through script, so it looks like getting the map zoom level via CSS is impossible. Getting the map pins and labels to scale would require support from the WA developers. Perhaps they could inject a class onto one or more of the map elements indicating the zoom level, e.g. "map-zoom-0", "map-zoom-1", "map-zoom--1" and so on. With those classes available, custom CSS could be added to scale or hide the map pins and labels however the world owner wants.
Pete Nelson
Monday, January 8, 2024
The past couple of days, I did some work to make articles, etc. look better. I added a background gradient to the articles, removed some margins, and made some other improvements that I hope make the site look better overall. Today, I began working on the Appleton and Dunton map, changing the markers to circles. I want to think about the markers more. One of my main complaints about the map markers in WA is that they don't scale, so when the map is zoomed way out, they're far too big. Changing the markers to circles or polygons fixes that, but then they aren't very attractive. It's probably going to require some CSS work to make them scale and still look decent. I'll investigate that some.
Pete Nelson
Saturday, January 6, 2024
I'm continuing to work on the Derkomai home page. I got some good feedback from Myth Cross, and that got me started thinking about the home page more. I added a little animated graphic to direct visitors to the "Planetary Intelligence Report," aka the Welcome page, cleaned up and added a tagline to the header image, changed some colors, and made a few other tweaks. Hopefully, I'm making it better, rather than worse. I don't totally trust my artistic instincts, so I hope people will like it and want to learn more about Derkomai. After I installed Campaign Cartographer, I started re-doing the map of Southport with it. It's slow going, and I'm not sure I like what I've done so far. I'll see how it goes. I might end up throwing it away, keeping the Wonderdraft map I started with and working to improve that one.
Pete Nelson
Thursday, January 4, 2024
In my seemingly never-ending quest to improve my maps I downloaded Campaign Cartographer 3+ and the rest of the tools from ProFantasy Software and started learning how to use them. This is one piece of software where the documentation is absolutely needed. It's powerful and complicated, and the UI is...weird. It's way out of date and looks like a (bad) Windows 95 application. The way it works might be intuitive to the designers of CC3+, but it definitely isn't to me. After working with it for a couple of days, I'm starting to get used to it, but I find myself constantly asking why? Why did they design it to work the way it does? I am a software architect and engineer (now retired), and I've designed and worked on many, many software systems, most for very large companies that demanded that their software work right and work well all the time. I've never seen a UI like CC3+'s. It could be so much simpler and easier to use than it is, and I just don't get why ProFantasy doesn't update and streamline the UI. CC3+ is really powerful and has some really cool functions that I haven't seen in any other map-making software, so I think that I'll (eventually) be able to create some good maps with it, but the learning curve is, frankly, painful. Besides CC3+, I've used Wonderdraft, Dungeondraft, Inkarnate, and a few other map-making applications, but I've yet to find one that I thought was really, really good - easy to use, with tons of assets in many styles/genres, and powerful features - that produces beautiful, functional maps (world, region, city, dungeon, floorplan, battle) in a variety of styles. They all have either significant limitations, are weird/quirky, or the maps they produce are not in a style I like. World Anvil is (was?) backing Project Deios, and it looks promising, but disappointing at the same time. The first posts announcing it were over three years ago, and the Kickstarter apparently brought in a fair amount of money, but as of today, there is only an alpha version available. I pre-ordered and downloaded the alpha 0.6.2 version and spent a little bit of time playing with it. It looks cool - maybe the answer to my quest for easy-to-make, great maps - so why is it taking so long to release? Has the project failed?
Pete Nelson
Monday, January 1, 2024
I wrote an article for the New Years Resolutions 2024 challenge reviewing ten articles that other authors and worldbuilders wrote for WorldEmber 2023. They were all interesting, fun reads, but a few stood out. E. Christopher Clark's article on "Edenian Slang" was funny and inspired me to think about slang in the languages of Derkomai. I like reading the work that other worldbuilders and authors create on WA, but I don't do so often enough, so I'm happy for the push that the New Year's Resolutions challenge gave me.
Pete Nelson
Sunday, December 31, 2023
Today I published my last article for WorldEmber 2023. The article was about Mystanidrax te Kinyel, the first Derkorim character I've described. Over the past few days, I've made huge changes to the Derkomai Home Page. Hopefully, it is interesting enough to draw a little more attention to the world!
Pete Nelson
Comments