DivNull Productions is pleased to announce the release of When Autochthon Dreams, a collection of fan-made artifacts for White Wolf’s role-playing game Exalted®.

Writing for this work originated in a number of fan sites for Exalted, particularly the Exalted wiki and Exalted Compendium Redux. Thanks go out to the writers who allowed their work to be included.

The artwork used in the PDF results from a bit of an experiment. Rather than an using an open, take-what-you-can-get approach, DivNull looked for fans of Exalted on deviantArt, inviting 75 of the most talented to participate. This process intentionally avoided inviting artists that have a lot of work published in Exalted books. Artists were invited over a long period, and given months of lead time to prepare art for today’s release. Of those contacted, six actually delivered art, a response of about 8%.

This response was less that what was hoped, but realistically better than expected, especially since no payment was offered or given. Thanks go out to those artists who contributed.

Thanks also go out to White Wolf for their Dark Pack guidelines, which allow supplements like this to be created in the first place.

Uncouth, DivNull’s variant of Exalted, is done enough for playtesting. It has been an interesting experiment, but it probably won’t continue much further, barring inspiration, or a lot of feedback. The variant aims to replace the cause-based mess of thousands of special case charm rules with a simplified, effect-based approach making use of a few dozen mechanical tricks. The basic change to the game carries with it a number of secondary effects, including a simplification of resolution, combat, timing and some other things.

Very few of the rules have been playtested, and some (particularly the social stuff), are based on more spurious math than others. It will no doubt need to be tweaked for balance.

If you are an Exalted fan, feel free to give it a run and leave comments here or on the wiki.

Around ten months ago, a project on the Exalted wiki started, aimed towards getting “orphaned” pages connected in to the main navigation pages. This was made much harder than it needed to be by virtue of this particular wiki using some very old software. Even worse, it’s not even using the latest version. Though this software was originally used for Wikipedia, it has been vastly outpaced by its replacement, MediaWiki, which has many features lacking in this old software. In particular, MediaWiki gives you a list of which pages are not linked to by anything else. This old software cannot. So, DivNull produced software to find these “orphaned” pages, which (hopefully) accelerated the process, which finished today.

The only reason to even mention something this trivial is that this code actually used from real computer science, in particular work done with directed graphs. Having already scraped the wiki source text for the whole site (for other reasons), it was fairly simple to build a directed graph of page links, representing which pages linked to others.

Once you have this graph, though, how do you answer questions like “what is the shortest path between this page and that one”? One good thing here is that the wiki has a single main entry page, and the idea was to find a path from that page to every other page in a short number of steps (no more than five steps turned out to be the most useful, given the way the wiki is organized). This simplifies the problem from finding the shortest path between two arbitrary nodes to finding the shortest path between one arbitrary node and one specific one. This still sounds computationally expensive (and it is), but also smells like a problem that someone has probably already found a good answer to.

A solution came in the form of some algorithms in the Perl Graph module, which is chock full of graph-based utility (and can even export to dot files). In particular, it contains an implementation of Dijkstra’s single-source shortest path problem algorithm, which solves this exact problem. Using these routines, generating the orphan list was fairly simple.

Producing diagrams of the wiki graph, however, was not. Though the graph is easily represented in the aforementioned .dot format, there are so many nodes that existing rendering routines choke on them. And, even if they did complete, the result was horrible to gaze upon. DivNull searched for some other approaches and found some interesting approaches to rendering large, sparse graphs.

One idea was to draw represent the page links as a sparse matrix. The University of Florida seems to do a lot of research in this area. Drawing them, however, seems fairly straight forward, so will probably be done as some future point.

Another idea uses a force-based approach specifically for very large graphs. A paper details a system that could easily handle a data set this size, but experimenting with it for the wiki will have to wait.

Naturally, new orphans will surface in no time, but its good for now.

Now seems like a good time to provide an update on where various DivNull “products” stand, for the curious. (Feel free to add requests or questions in the comments.) Here’s what is (or, in some cases, isn’t) happening:

Omnihedron

The closest thing DivNull has to a real software product, Omnihedron has been languishing. This is due to two main factors that happened more or less simultaneously. The first was that Wordman changed jobs into a company that avoided Windows like the plague, so access to and interest in the platform (never high) waned to zero.

At about the same time came the realization that wxWidgets, the cross-platform framework on which Omnihedron is built, wasn’t going to cut it. While it is a great framework, it has some minor issues that get amplified when applied to Omnihedron. By far the largest of these is a design philosophy which (at least at the time) implemented new features without much concern given to backward compatibility. This essentially meant that to use the framework, if you weren’t regularly keeping up with the latest changes, your code went stale. Given that development on Omnihedron tended to come in bursts separated by long gaps, this was particularly lethal. For example, on at least two occasions, when work resumed after months of stagnation, the entire system for laying out windows had been apparently deprecated, replaced with some new thing. It could be that Omnihedron just hit this sort of thing at the exact wrong time and wxWidgets is better at this now, but I don’t know.

This same issue made ports to other platforms, particularly the Mac, slow to catch up to the main branch. Worse, the Mac port was built on Carbon, an API clearly announced to be a dead end. It appears some progress has since been made on a Cocoa version, but even this is not yet ready.

All of this combined with a realization that, while DivNull has decades of professional C++ programming experience, C++ is actually a dumb programming language.

Even so, the intent is to revive Omnihedron “at some point”. A new version is certain to be Mac first, and will mostly likely be Mac only (well, maybe an iPhone version). The large stumbling block here is that DivNull doesn’t have much Cocoa experience, so will be learning.

Web Software

DivNull is working on some web software that may or may not see the light of day. Domains for these projects exist, but are being kept secret for the moment. These projects include:

• A site dedicated to data representation in roleplaying games, built around (but not requiring) a universal scheme for storing both stats and rules. There is a “philosophy” which goes with this standard which, after a lot of thinking about it, DivNull thinks is an extremely useful way to think about such data (and also takes the standard beyond the realm of just roleplaying). This site requires a lot of documentation in order to be convincing, which doesn’t yet exist. It also opens up the possibility for about a dozen other software projects.
• Web software (built on CakePHP) for creating “meta-indexes”. These are documents that collectively index a whole range of books, essentially mixing an index for each of the books together into one large one. The main domain idea is to gather information for a “family” of role-playing books, which often have no index at all, though other applications are possible. (This is more exciting than it sounds.) There will also be a site that hosts an instance of this software.
• A site for posting detailed travel logs without revealing your identity to the reader. This is more of a pet project, intending to just share travel advice with friends (who would probably know who you are) in a public place, without worrying that information about, say, your family and such would link specifically to you. If you’d be interested in writing for it, let me know.

Desktops

Being slightly obsessed with taking photographs of random surfaces for some time, DivNull will probably release a large collection of desktop/texture based art in some fashion, probably using Gallery 2. These will likely be released under a Creative Commons license.

Roll Play Dice Library

RollPlay exists for two reasons: 1) to define a standard way of representing dice and a parser to read it and 2) to provide much better pseudo-randomization for dice than was available at the time. The latter of these goals is now basically moot, since the standard randomization routines available now are much better than they used to be.

If RollPlay is altered (which it will need to be for Omnihedron to be moved to Cocoa), it will likely be by adding support for other languages, rather than changing much else about it.

And no, it still doesn’t need to support parentheses.

Roleplaying

Most roleplaying work continues to focus on Exalted. A collaborative netbook of Exalted artifacts called When Autochthon Dreams will be released by the end of the year.

Even while this work continues, DivNull’s disaffection with Exalted increases. Unless this changes, the collected charm tree project will finish out Second Edition, but will not continue beyond that.

End of life

Titles marked as “final version” on the software page will not be changed or upgraded, but will still be available for download.

After eight years, the main DivNull site is finally getting a redesign. In addition to a new look, the site is now backed by the leading blogging software. Most importantly, it now supports RSS feeds.

In doing this redesign, it was also decided to change names from DivNull Software to DivNull Productions, and to merge the various non-software production we have done all along under the main label. This was done mostly to provide “one-stop shopping” for people interested in what we are making these days, but also because the line between what is “software” and “not software” is blurring so much that the distinction is loosing its meaning.

As much of our “not software” work consisted of products for tabletop role-playing games, expect to see more news of such on this page from now on. Announcements will be categorized (see the categories to the right).

We are also actively working on some web-based projects that may or may not see the light of day. If they do, they will likely debut under their own domain names. Even so, this site will still be used to make announcements about them.

Thanks to those of you who have supported DivNull over the years. We hope to make the coming years even better.

Intended for use in Exalted forums, the last of the artwork representing celestial caste marks from that game have been completed, as the new sidereal marks join the rest.

Like the others, these are renders within Bryce. Unlike the others, they required some post render work in Photoshop in order to get their glows to look right.

In the game of Exalted, there was a long past First Age, when everything was awesome (except for the growing psychosis of the demigod rulers of the place) and Creation was much larger. No maps had been produced of this time, but DivNull has released one to Lore 5, created as if it were a tile mosiac that might be found in a tomb or ruined palace.

This was a raster project done in Photoshop, with much of the heavy lifting done by a demo of Xenofex. This could be improved in a number of ways, particularly by adding a bit more depth.

DivNull Software has become responsible for building the Mac OS X release of Anathema, a java-based manager for the Exalted role-playing game. The job consists of turning a Java application in a double-clickable Mac app.

While much of Anathema is not particularly Mac-looking, DivNull will work to make it more so. A post on an Exalted-based forum tracks problems found during the process so far, and their solutions.

Rathess is an abandoned city in the game of Exalted, formerly the most important city in Creation. A small, not very helpful map exists in the books, but a bigger one was needed. DivNull’s version has been released to Lore 5, a site that collects content for Exalted.

This is another vector map made in Illustrator, using a lot of its texture and transparency capabilities. The map used a technique to overlap pattern fills with different periods, to prevent the repetitive “pattern” look. It sort of worked, but not entirely.

Chiaroscuro is a large city in the world of Exalted, marked by the ruins of ancient glass buildings, shattered by a great battle. No map exists in canon of this city, so DivNull has produced one. It can be found posted to Lore 5, a site that collects content for Exalted.

This marks DivNull’s first publicly released map since the Sixth World. The map is vector based, produced with Adobe Illustrator. Not the best work, frankly, particularly the colors, but served its purpose.