20240918

I begin my journey mapping the Realm, Despothes Grove (the free / old version), server v3.52. It's pretty late, so I won't be mapping much. This is a game I've wanted to play since the mid-late '90s, back when Sierra still owned it. This iteration is... well. Small. It'd look just right on my old CRT, but this 1980x1080 LED display laughs at the game's teeniness. It's also something of an eye strain for me. Full screen is a blurry, very not funny joke. Not sure what's up with that.

The game definitely does not "hold your hand". No map -- which is arguably the main reason I'm playing this game (that is, to make a map), nostalgia being second. A quest log completely void of details. A hunger system with no indication of satiety (presumably -- I haven't faced any effects of starvation, yet). Very limited item descriptions (I mean in the way of statistics -- what and how much they're actually expected to do). I also noticed that the Help button is quite dead. I feel like when I first played this game there was more information about the various aspects of the game.

I mapped out East Leinster and its dungeon, a tiny bit of East Havenwood, the Newbie Cave, and some of Arimathor.

Made it to player level 2.

20240919

I decided to make some tables for the spells and armaments, too. I don't really want to do all the work for a "complete guide to the realm". One, because it's too much work; two, because I have no idea how long this game will stay up; three, I don't know how much will change if it stays up. I'm making the tables fairy detailed, but I'm leaving out some stuff, like the prices (reason three, and I don't want to check every store to see if they're different in each store), and cross referencing where each item can be found. ... I might consider the latter, later, though. Which means I had to redo my rounds through East Leinster.

I noticed something curious about mythril equipment. With weapons (including throwing weapons), mythril weighs less than iron / oaken, but also does less damage. I really don't see the benefit, since it also costs considerably more than tempered steel. If I can get more swings in because it's lighter, cool; but if it means that I merely get to carry more loot, not cool. With armor, the armor rating is the same across materials, with mythril being the lightest. Also, the most expensive, but this is understandable. However, steel is lighter and cheaper than tempered steel, so why ever buy it? Does the item's (hidden) durability come into play, here? With shields, mythril is the clear winner in both armor rating and weight. Why the odd inconsistency between weapons, armor, and shields?

I've been using LibreOffice Calc for the maps, and text files for the rest. It's been working pretty well. Though, I realized that I needed to make a standard markup and list of keywords. I don't have much experience with semi-large projects, and I've already did a fair amount of checking and editing cells.

I created another character to fill in some of the stuff that I didn't write down with my first character. I also created a couple more so that I could record the starting equipment for the other classes. Seems that "newbie", "training" and "new character" are all just renamed items that already exist in stores, rather than being items with unique stats; so they weren't added to the armaments table -- it's cluttered enough as it is.

With all this reworking, I didn't get much mapping done, today, other than filling in the rest of Arimathor.

I saw over 40 users online, today -- a record high, according to my recent experience with this game. :P

20240920

This game clearly shows signs of changing many hands, with the following conflicts of opinion about how this game should play. I'm assuming that, at one time, skill mastery could only be learned by books up to Expert, then teachers had to be found. However, now all the books can simply be bought. This rather kills the adventure aspect of the game. There is some benefit in doing the skill quests, though, and that's that the skill books themselves are the rewards.

There are also shops where too much can be bought, like the shop inside The Scimitar Tavern in Arimathor. There are also derelict buildings, like the Realm Trader, in East Leinster, which, I imagine, used to fulfill some worthy purpose -- perhaps networking trades between users by allowing them to post buy / sell offers. Then there are so many little areas, like the gardens, cafes, training grounds, etc., that the designers must have held a high hope for establishing a feeling of community, that turned out like so many community projects in the real world do -- underutilized. I'm wondering if the players could also formally get married. All this confusion, together with the considerable lack of players in the game, really makes the game feel like a ruin. It's quaint in that way -- like ruins are quaint. Interesting to explore, interesting to dream about the dead dreams of others. Interesting to listen to the stories of the ghosts that haunt it (that is, the Gossip channel). It's also as sad as it is quaint. The game could as surely be called The Ruin Online, because, like so many that came before and after, it's little more than a curious reminder of what was.

Finished mapping all of Leinster. Not a fan of dropping the [s] on possessive nouns, but this game is full of them. Thought it amusing that there is both Despothes' Grove and Despothes's Temple.

I feel like that when I played this for the first time, back in the 90s, the area between East and West Leinster was charred and filled with ratling enemies. It's all a garden, now. I wonder if this was one of those changes that came from changing hands.

The One Academy in West Leinster houses the largest section of lore in the game. For some reason, some of the dialogue has a glossary at the end. Which is certainly a curious way to talk. Glossary, noun, a collected explanation of words. I'm thinking that most of this stuff wasn't actually meant to be uploaded in this state. Like when Orwain even says [players]. ... Games are only allowed to break that wall intentionally -- and this shouldn't be an intentional moment. 

Back to the skill teachers, namely the magic teachers -- why do they offer training in skills that aren't related to the spells that they sell? If Nassoula teaches mysticism from familiar to grandmastery, why does she only sell elementalism spells?

Again, the special inn that sell too much equipment, one in Arimathor, one in Asgard, and one, I imagine, in another town -- each catering to Evil, Neutral, and Good, respectively -- is something else that feels left over from a change of hands. It's pretty lame in its narrative, and, again, all the stuff in one place makes it feel too much like Walmart or something.

The transition from Wandering Woods to Ascetos Desert feels too abrupt.

Mapping Murias.

Why isn't Corie in Corie's Coiffures, and who is Delwyn? I think it's curious I can call Kendra a loon without a good reason, and she just shrugs it off. The writing in this game ranges from "what?" to "bizarre" to "dull" to, at its peak, "merely okay". So, yeah, pretty bad on average, and quite sparse at that. Not terribly fond of games that expect the players to write the story. And what's up with nearly everyone dodging the "rumors" question. It's like a placeholder some developer stuck in. "Yeah, we're really going to fill this out, one day." Same thing with asking an NPC if it needs help with anything. "Come back later" -- which means [never].

Just noticed a bug -- going west from Tasty Morsels results in ending up in a square *not* one west of Tasty Morsels, but three west of Mystic Magic -- that is, three west, one south of Tasty Morsels. Certainly made the game more "interesting", but not in a pleasant way. I let the people in Discord, The Realm Online, #bug-report know about it. I also let them know that active quests keep dropping from the quest list and have to be restarted.

Xolina, from Goddess Dreams, actually teaches thaumaturgy *and* sells the associated spells. What a fine exception, even if she is a blowhard.

Funny. Someone in the Gossip channel requested maps. The player was pointed to some crusty stuff from an archived web page. I don't know if I'll finish these, so I didn't toot my horn. :p

Mapping Caer Fandry.

I should probably stop whining about the writing.

Mapping Kurz.

I find it curious how the sign outside the shops often don't match the function of the shops. ... This had to be something sloppy from the beginning. "Hey, Bob, I need some exterior shop decorations. Just go wild. But try to cover all the bases. You know, weapon shop, food shop, grocery, inn -- all that." Then those were handed over to the level editors. "Yeah, this looks like a building. This is just a mockup, anyway. We can always change it, later."

Mapping Wen.

Why would Hana offer her wedding ring as a reward for cleaning her cellar. ... That sentence could be loaded with innuendo. Regardless, is her husband dead? Possibly -- since she doesn't mention him in her short dialogue.

I saw Shining Forge and thought of Shining Force.

Why is Randa also Rothos? Which came first? Or is the shopkeeper a loon?

No Fiona, I can't see Jenneva's Garden through the window, unless complete darkness is the garden, which would be an awful garden.

In the middle of Anuan's Belt quest, back in Caer Foundry, Bidosk's dialogue is cut short. Yay, another bug report. Or at least, there would have been, until someone replied that there are "no updates to that server" -- meaning Despothes's Grove. Oh well. ... And why did Anuan's Belt end up being Misha's Belt? This game is so sloppy!  

Mapping Drune.

The Exterior of Drune Chapel feels identical to another grid that I've visited.

Why does Temoc from Curses 'n Cures Welcome me to The Broken Jug -- as establishment one north, two east from his position? Does Frixel of The Broken Jug know about this? Another bug report I don't have to bother reporting. Heh. He even calls himself Frixel. And offers the same limerick. At least the shop seems to work properly, offering different goods.

Curiously Wanda calls herself Gracia (also known as Wanda). ... Why?

"Because in the swing he had kr." ... That's a terrible line for a limerick. And ends with "This Mr. kr. sr." Nissa offers terrible limericks.

Noticed another bug. Actually, it's bugged me since I first saw it. In Arimathor, in Desert Magic, Jeni, the teacher of Healing, sends the player on a fetch quest to Drune to pick up an embroidered potion holder from Cassie. What bugged me was that there is no Healing skill in the game. However, since I finally made it to Drune, of course I went looking for Cassie. But Cassie doesn't seem to exist -- much like the Healing skill.

Got to level 3. This game is such a grind. I probably would have loved it 27 years ago with a buddy or two to group with, but now I'm wondering how far I'll go.

20240921

I remembered the region directly east of East Leinster being named Ratling Run instead of East Havenwood.

Mapping Monmouth.

The Gatekeeper said "Monmouth Arms Estates". Maybe that's the proper name of the location.

Here is another quest oddity. As Anuan's belt ended up being Misha's Belt, Nassoula's Boots ended up being Minka's Boots. What gives?

If there's one thing consistent among all of the towns -- besides bad writing, lifeless NPCs, boring fetch quests, and essentially empty dialogue trees (very short, branch-less trees) -- it's this constant referral to recent "attacks". Probably related to the "Mists". I'm guessing this was from some story arc from some former version of the game. All it's left it with, though, is a very bleached skeleton -- though I doubt there was much flesh to begin with.

Brindal says that it never rains in Monmouth, and, reading my mind, follows with "we nourish the soil in other ways". Not sure if I'm supposed to interpret that in a low-brow or sinister way. I'd prefer the latter, since pissing all over the place is more absurd than I care to enjoy. It also fails, logically, to provide for the water necessary for animal life. It's green all around Monmouth -- the water has to come from somewhere. Unless they have incredible plumbing and irrigation systems, the sinister option is the only viable one. Brindal mentions something about the previous inhabitants of the area, their presumed powers, and something about the name of his inn. This could be a nice story arc to explore, but this game was stillborn back in the 90s.

Volzer mentions coming from Bath. This made me think of England. Perhaps he meant England, since there is no Bath on this map.

Sven mentioned another god -- Luna. Clearly not one of the six (and a half, if Enid's daughter is included). Is this more confusion from multiple owners of the game?

Wirkkala suggests that Luna "provides rich soil". This seemingly contradicts Bridal who said "we nourish the soil". I prefer Brindal's version. Arimathor already has unlimited water from Duach. Of course, if Duach and Luna are the same person, that would be somewhat interesting, but only in a pervy, Greek mythology sort of way.

Hmm. Just had my first experience with "linkdead / ghosted". Apparently, it resolved itself.

Who leaves these metal bars all over the place? Most of them can't even be picked up (or bring up the interface wheel).

I know I've ran from a lot of battles in this game. And low proficiency magic sucks. And levels come pretty slowly. I don't remember everything being *this* grindy.

Lalana, from The Last Call, copies all of Kell's lines, from House of Combat, in the same way as the couple of NPCs from Drune.

It seems bizarre that monsters can attack immediately after a player leaves a town. This feels too abrupt. There should be a short (even hidden) timer that starts after leaving a calm area in which the player can't be attacked. Not realistic, perhaps -- but games aren't realistic.

Mapping Silverbrook.

You might ask. "Josh, why are you doing what has already been done (and possibly done better)?" Well, I asked myself that question -- quite after the fact. Which means that I was either being absentminded (or arrogant), or that that wasn't what was important to me. It's mostly the latter. Say, 90:10. So what was important? The Realm is a game that I played around '97 with a dear friend of mine for a few hours, and that moment had a lasting impact. And though I've played the game a couple times, each briefly, after that, I've never felt like I "finished" it. It was like that with Runescape, a while back, and I did return to and played it enough to satisfy the longing that my teenage soul left me. The Mystic Realms of Alhanzar is another game that I'll probably look up. As for The Realm, it's too large, and grindy, and devoid of... charm? -- story, at any rate -- for me to go all the way through it. But -- and this is the 10 part -- when I set out to put this ghost to rest, I was looking through the (mostly archived) information related to the game, and was rather underwhelmed. It all felt pretty stale, and the maps were tattered with age. I thought, "I can do this better (see, more arrogant than absentminded)". It, however, is a monstrous task. I'm shooting for mapping the overworld. The dungeons ultimately require strong characters, but I figure I can ghost my character through most of the surface. We'll see.

I stopped trying to catalogue all the items and skills -- the game itself throws up overly tall hurdles, there. The quest list I'm working on will also be incomplete. So, basically, just the overworld map, with some generic knowledge. "What's the point?" To "finish" it. That will be enough for me. Maybe someone will fork the repository and have a relatively fresh thing to work with. Or maybe it'll go the way of the rest of the things related to this game. This is human endeavor -- to be forgotten. Good thing I'm a believer, since a sane man is otherwise doomed to be a pessimist.

Curiously, GodOfThunder sent me a Realm mail filled with various bits of information, and one thing that caught my attention was a link to a "site with an actual interactive realm map with hover over blow ups of shops and caves." *That* I wanted to see, since that's kind of what I'm aiming at. In fact, I could have stopped playing and have been quite content. However, unfortunately, the link never resolved.

Berserker's are quite violent. They attack immediately (I recall my desire for a safety timer), and they're fast. They act first (compared to my level 3 wizard) and manage to charge all the way across the screen and attack -- for several thousands of damage -- before I can attempt to flee. Guess I shouldn't have leveled up to 3 before I finished mapping the towns.

Okay, Wonduri's limerick is the only one that gave me a good chuckle. I'll write it down for posterity.

There was an elf lady named Bright
Whose speed was much faster than light
She went out one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night

Yes, Wonduri, that was "neatly done". 

I'm wondering why the clothing shops have the clothes all folded up like they are -- not ordered by color or anything. Is the current assortment more visually pleasing? Yes -- though all the shops across the land look the same, so it loses whatever it gains pretty quickly. So I'm stuck with the logical question, "Wouldn't it be more efficient to sort them?" "Yes", obviously. But a marketing person might suggest that the longer a customer stays in a store, the more likely he is to buy something. But that logic falls away pretty quickly, since this is a video game, and things are bought from a menu, not by actually rifling through hundreds of pounds of fabric. Moreover, the NPCs are frequently quite verbally short, and some state plainly "buy and get out". ... My guess is the artist just did it this way because "it looks good (enough)" and nobody else cared to ask (or think) about it.

... I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. In another meandering fetch quest that starts in Silverbook, eventually an elf in Caer Fandy named Avery asks me do get his tools, and I give him Stench's Tools. Why so many mismatches? 

Mapping Usk. The last city on the map.

So, Nika, the gatekeeper, also mentions the elusive Bath. Apparently it's an evil town of giants. (A town of evil giants? I'm rereading this log, and I'm not sure if she said it exactly this way.) And Usk is apparently a giant town -- so that's three of the character races with a town. Why no orc town? At least one of the elf towns was apparently previously ruled by orcs, but none of the towns currently are. ... I just noticed that Nika has a girl's face and a man's chest.

Bijou? 美女? I guess she's okay for a giant. 

Durion also mentions Bath. Where's Bath?!

Holiph said that his giant ancestors "sailed afar from Bath". I was right -- it is in England. :p

Gardens R Usk is one of the few unique stores in The Realm -- the others being the funiture store, Swap 'n Shop, in West Leinster and the cart that sells musical instrument in Leinster. I notice the teleport map wasn't updated for this store, either.

Hmm. Fashion Delights has a limited edition Vetr Tunic. It's very turquoise.

Hah! Another teacher that also sells the relevant spells -- Loyaro of Mabon's Magic.

And that's that! Now I have to level my wizard so I can go invisible. ... So I guess I'll play my warrior for a bit to get some money to fund my wimpy wizard.

Third... fourth time I was dropped today? Server problems? Maybe not, since the other player don't seem to have been affected. When I logged in, I notice that the server had been up for 17+ days. So, yeah, presumably something on my end.

Mapping East Havenwood.

A low level monster dropped an expensive helmet -- a Night Soul. "Cool", I thought. Identified it to make sure there wasn't something wrong with it. Wore it. Sold my old helmet. Stepped into Bloodwood and was attacked before I could turn around. A lich melted my character before I could flee. A cobra picked up my helmet and ran off with it. Easy come, easy go, apparently. ... These abrupt transitions with no security timer.

Mapping North Havenwood.

It's interesting that some of the loot that monsters drop is books. They feel like they were written by players -- but that's still arguably a step up from the language given to the NPCs. Unfortunately, whatever happened to the game during its changing of hands, all of the books apparently have a maximum length to them. I noticed this in the Book of Tutorial, but I thought that perhaps only it was affected. Apparently not. I'll still collected these, for now, and make a little library at my house.

Got my warrior to level 9. Low levels are so much easier to climb with a brute. Dropped off a little over 11 grand in my wizard's chest. Probably should have just cleaned up the Ivory Moon Cafe where the pros hang out (and litter treasure everywhere). But, I feel like doing this the hard way. For now, anyway. :P

Speaking of the hard way, the skill tome fetch quests are so long and tedious and dull that the time spent simply fighting and earning gold would be time much better spent. I've done... 10 of them? Plus a number of other quests. That's enough. Period. 

20240922

With his new windfall, I took my wizard shopping, and I'm bent on leveling him to a proper exploring capacity. Hopefully this won't take too long. Back to East Havenwood...

Why do I do this to myself? Why am I going on another fetch quest? Why am I trying to make a comprehensive guide when I know I won't follow through with it -- especially since I've already failed to note the names of several of the quests?

Will, who the hell is Katie? And why the hell do you have an accent, now? And why does Talu also call you Katie now that you want a coat? And why is it a coat for Geezer (yes, let's insult the old hag), now that you've given it to me? What loon decided to change all the NPCs' names and not update the quest text? And, on a related note, why does Usk's gatekeeper have a girl's head and a guy's body? That one still annoys me. ... In fact, after seeing more girl heads on guy bodies, I made a giant female just to makes sure. Yeap. Either it's a bug, or someone intentionally put female heads on male bodies.

I've had several very generous players offer to suit me up with end-game equipment, but I've turned them down. Even the old guides for this game suggest to do just that -- go ask players to "suit you up". They even give a nice list of what to expect. ... That's simply the wrong way to play a game. If a game is actually made so poorly that that's necessary, well, like I said, it's a poor game. I've seen several advertisements for mobiles games like that -- "new players" "catch up" -- as if I needed to catch up. There's just something fundamentally wrong with that. Beginners start at the beginning. I'm not saying that those that have shouldn't be allowed to be generous, or that those that have not shouldn't be allowed to accept charity. I'm saying it's wrong when it's a given -- when it's expected. It's wrong for a man that can work to not work. By that I mean for his necessities. If I can work but choose to accept what I need (or more than that), so that I can goof off, I'm a fool. Games make it worse since things that must come with discipline, like physical skills, can be granted instantly by generous players. I'm ranting. 

Mapping West Havenwood.

The general knowledge is that leveling wizards is harder. I don't think that that's the case. Once they have a decent supply of mana, Hold Monster (familiar Mysticism), and Multiblade (proficient Sorcery), they do pretty well for themselves -- at least around Leinster. My wizard is level 7 and killing monsters twice his level, and that's the key -- killing monsters over the player's level. Just have to pick and choose them. Curiously, high hp doesn't equate with high level, so these rats are quite the blessing. The undead, however, suck, since they have 100% resistance to Mysticism. They also like occassionally resurrecting -- which is quite annoying, especially when they're on top of me. Faeries have 25%, but since I'm Good aligned, I don't mess with them (for now). 

Well, either invisibility is a bust, or the undead can see invisible. What's the point of invisibility? To hide from enemies that aren't a threat? More jank. It does seem to give me the first hit on rats, though. Maybe just the annoying enemies can see invisible. Yay. 

The master sorcery quest leaves the player with a useless item -- Authorization. Nobody required it by the time the quest finished. Whatever. Worse is the Expert Mysticism quest. Got sent on a wild goose chase to find a "bag" in "Leinster". Talked to everyone, East to West, and found no dialog related to the quest. Unless I missed someone.

I hate how this game has "hidden" rooms that have to be looked for by scanning each side of the screen with the mouse, because it's not clear that the room extends any farther. Wen Clothing Cellar was awful about that. I imagine other dungeons will annoy me similarly.

Yeah... I'm pretty sure I'm going to stop with these skill book quests.

Had some fun inscribing items. (:

Heh, people are talking about the first Realm wedding since the relaunch.

Alrighty. Finished West Havenwood, and got my wizard to level 9 and my warrior to level 12.

20240923

Wrat and Countess were joking about poop guns and shooting them at each other, last night. I found some imp guano during my adventure and thought, "Yeah...". So I inscribed it [From Wrat, With Love] and planted it on Countess. No idea if I'll get to see that resolution, but I'll content myself with this much. :P

Found a nice looking world map over at Fandom. No idea how accurate it is for this version of the game, though.

I decided to scrape some of the information from various sites. It's hard to say what should be attributed to whom. That's the problem with Intellectual Property in general. I'll record here a list of names that I've assembled (along with a wiki) -- all of them appear to be pseudonyms -- just in case somebody feels the need to say "That's me! I did that! Weeeooweoweeee!" 

Fandom, TheOracle, Justintyme, HyJinks, Bryan, SandyClaws, SantaClaws, BrainIess, ElfKing, JackFrost, TruckloadHP, Kirstien, Estella, Informational, Pyramid, PyramidCubed, Ellipse, Ellipses, Magicrusher, Vera Gemini

Just because a name is listed, it doesn't mean that I scraped anything from that source. Just covering the bases -- actual and imaginary. Still, I'm not uploading anything that I haven't checked myself (or formed my own opinion of).

Amusingly, the archived realmserver site has this to say --

Arguably the worst addition to the game since its inception, "Quests" in the Realm are little more than errand-boy missions. You go to the shop that offers what you want and they send to the another place to get something they want and so on... eventually you get an item and reverse the sequence. Yawn!

-- Exactly. But instead of fixing quests, the developer just let all of the skill book be bought, again. Doesn't feel like any real development on the part of the player. Why not just allow the build points to be allotted to the skills from the character sheet. By the time the player is experienced enough, the relatively paltry cost in gold for the books could just be written off. Streamline it, or make it interesting. This "middle ground" approach is bogus. Streamline a game enough, and it becomes an "idle" game. Since this is supposed to be an RPG, that's the wrong direction. So, yes, "fix the quests" would be my suggestion.

Also noticed that there was also an unimplemented Tracking skill (to go along with the unimplemented Healing skill). No idea what the plan for that one was. Tracking monsters? For what? After they kill you and take your stuff? Tracking other players? Any relation to bounty hunting? Definitely sounds more RP than practical. I'm not against that, but gamers tend towards what's practical -- whatever does the most DPS; however that can be attained the quickest. Anyway, the list of fetch quests is quite comprehensive... and just as dated. However, I decided to see if the elusive Cassie of Drune could be found following this ancient help. Firstly, the shop in Arimathor, Desert Magic, 1 north from the gatekeeper, apparently used to be called Desert Breeze Elixers, and was 1 East, 1 South, 1 West from the gatekeeper. Already looking bad. And what's with the roundabout? Since Ali's Weaponry clearly isn't what I should be looking for, I (re)started the quest back at Desert Magic. Yes, *re*started, since the quest system is broken as well as crap in the Realm. Now, in Drune, I should go 2 North, from the gatekeeper, to find Healing Magic. Much not to my surprise, I find Broken Jug, a tavern. Clearly the healer fell on hard times. Or found out that aqua vitae was, in fact, the best medicine. Whatever the case, Frixel is not Cassie, and Healing Magic is an establishment nowhere to be found in Drune (or anywhere in the Realm). This quest is certainly bust, and the archived quest information is certainly outdated. And I'm certainly tired of fetch quests. No more fetch quests. None! I mean it this time! :p

I noticee that on the finer maps that some have created, there are divisions between the cells indicating whether there are walls or not. This is nice. This is ideal. This is *not* what I'm doing. The level of detail is proportionate to the level of work, and I simply am not going to do that much work. What I'm offering (or, will be offering, assuming I complete it) is more like a geographical map. Look, a mountain chain, a river, a gorge. Can I cross it on foot? I'll find that out when I get there.

Mapping South Havenwood.

Yeah, looking at the room chat, invisibility is clearly broken. Either that, or everything can see invisible -- which is pretty much the same thing.

I really despise the large variation in damage from the same attack on the same opponent.

Mapping Emerald Forest.

Monsters are way too high-leveled for my wizard, but the denizens haven't jumped me yet. Apparently this is a fine place to walk for a "good" aligned character. The dark faeries are annoying, though. Oh, and thieves. Of course there'd need to be something to attack me. The assortment of creatures in all these regions make so little sense.

Some people in chat insured me that Invisibility is working the way that it was intended. If that's the case, the developers were certainly loons.

Most regions I've visited so far have done a terrible job with warning about transitions. However, the Emerald Forest has been pretty forthcoming.

Why does this Earc guy have such a large stock in the middle of nowhere? Crap like this makes the game seem that much more absurd.

Playing around on chat, I ended up getting some generosity forced on me. Wrat even came to my location to deliver it. This robe looks hideous, though. I can't see my bulging muscles anymore. :P I re-engraved the items to [The Wratpack] and [A Wratty Robe], to give him due honor. :P

Why is there an Identify spell when it's essentially garbage. Why not just call Greater Identify [Identify]? And Greater Invisibility [Invisibility], for that matter? And why is Identify a mysticism spell where Greater Identify is a Sorcery spell? 

Dude, the Emerald Forest is huge. Got all the roads done, and there is a lot of whitespace to fill in. Think I'll go grind some levels in South Havenwood.

There's a curious battle music glitch. After I Hold the monster, the music stops until the monster can move again. 

Pfft. I just found a Healing mastery book. No, I'm not going to spend 5 build points on it to see what an unimplemented skill does.

Made it to level 19 with my wizard.

20240924

Thankfully, I'm tough enough to pick off the occasional troll or ogre while mapping this Emerald Forest. Two birds, and all that.

From a moral position, why am I slaughtering things that haven't hurt me, neither have they been known to harm others or their property, nor are they considered a sort of sustenance? I'm not "killing to kill", of course -- I'm killing to *progress*. But that's arguably just as immoral. At least they don't make terrible death noises or make me feel guilty in any other way. And none of the denizens around seems to care. They're worse than fish. There's not even a "Hey, at least it wasn't me." Does a game really have to be this disconnected from reality? Maybe.

Since I'm killing all the non-magical trolls and ogres (and creatures in general, since they're less dangerous, by giving me more time to kill them), under the demented notion of eugenics, I'm doing these creatures a favor by culling all of the stupid ones. In some number of generations, with "smart" trolls being the only trolls left to breed with each other (do trolls breed?), they will eventually be able to join society... in some manner. We can look forward to the day where elves and ogres can play on the swingset together, men and trolls can study math together.

I've been pondering on the map, again. I didn't find out until later that I could type /room to get the room number. That would have been nice to know in the beginning, because I would have numbered all of the rooms. Very handy. Very late in the game. I really do not want to go back through all of the places I've discovered to add the room numbers. ... On a similar note, mentioned before, there are some rooms that can't be traveled between. Identifying all of the room exits would have added a lot of complexity to the map. On top of that, some exits are one way, adding *that much more* complexity. Another thing that I don't want to go back to implement. This is also why I have decided to not do the dungeons at all.

It sure is bugging me not having those room numbers. ... Sheeeeeeeit.

Heh. Just found a book of Tracking grandmastery. Did the developers leave them in there just hoping to implement them one day?

A thief (NPC) just stole 1 gold and 32 mana from me -- an insult more than anything. I retaliated. He had a throwing dagger. I'd been wanting to know whether Hold Monster, simply kept the opponent from moving, or kept it from acting completely. It's the latter -- a pleasant discovery.

And a gargoyle just took my belt of strength. Perhaps I'll return someday for my revenge on all of its people.

Yeap, even Invisibility-Improved is garbage. I still think it's broken, in spite of the consensus. And the improved version stays on even after a fight? ... I mean, I'm fine with that. It's not like the Invisible Man all of the sudden became visible -- I've always thought that was nonsense in RPGs. But since it's seemingly broken regardless, it just means I get to keep the shadow graphics without needing to recast.

Alrighty... Added those... room numbers... from Caer Fandry west and north to the Northern Steppes.

Also made it to level 28.

20240925

Instead of continuing to add the missing room numbers to the places that I've already mapped, I'm thinking of coming back to that later -- should I actually finish this project. From here on out, with new areas, I'll add the room numbers to begin with. Fixing work is so annoying.

Playing around with the spells, I just noticed that I can cast Extension outside of battle, and it's still effective -- that is, still waiting for the next spell to be cast -- in battle. So now my Hold spell can work for 7 rounds instead of 5. That would have been nice to know sooner. :p

Mapping Leinster / Kurz Road.

My lack of levels is severely impeding my mapping. One bird at a time.

Attempted to map Bloodwood. It's essentially the evil version of Emerald Forest. Which means things are constantly jumping me. Wouldn't be a problem if the enemies weren't all seemingly resistant to mysticism -- Hold being critical to my game plan. I'll have to circle back to this region.

I think it's curious that there's a Leinster / Kurz Road region, when there's already a road connecting the two cities running through East Havenwood. So two roads connect the cities. Leinster is already the hub of the Realm, but two roads would suggest a lot of commerce between these cities. Yet, considering the NPCs' conversation, Kurz is something of a den of thieves -- and not in the Las Vegas kind of way. So why so much traffic? I believe I'm thinking more about this game than the designers did. "Hey, I think that'll look good there." "Okay, Bob, let's go with that." That, or all the ill talk about Kurz came later. "That sounds cool. Who cares if the foundation doesn't support it?"

Decided to backtrack and explore The Zoo. Amusing place. Zelbic has no qualms about having human specimens to exhibit. This is a bestiary of sorts, apparently housing one of each type of creature in the game, some with graphical variations. No combat, though.

The background for 9230, Bloodwood does not follow the graphic from 4206, Zender's Woods. The latter has a road leading north, but the former is a road-less forest. Either something else used to be in 9230's place, or the guy laying out levels didn't check his work. At least this one doesn't transfer incorrectly like that tile west of Murias.

I think it's curious that there are never any monsters on dungeon entrance tiles.

It's curious how much this feels like a job (that I'm not getting paid for).

Before now, I was keeping a rather detailed list of monsters in each region. This was very tedious, since I had to right click every new monster and click on look, while also hovering the mouse over the enemy, since whoever wrote the info text didn't think to include the hitpoints. However, since I've realized that The Zoo is something of a Noah's ark, so to speak, I can write this information down once, in its own region, and readers can reference that. And since hitpoints are roughly symmetrical with level (among monster types, not in general), I've decided to just record min-max hitpoints, making things that much more streamlined. Boy, I like doing less (tedious) work.

There's no doubt in my mind that the developers of this game expected players to group together. The dungeons are the biggest indicators of this thought. The rooms in the dungeons generally have groups of monster that, while low-leveled enough to take on individually, are pretty lethal for a solo player of equivalent level. Of course, once the player starts gaining levels and proficiencies, the need to group seems to taper off. But what we tend to be left with is a lot of solo players leveling in the wilderness and avoiding the early dungeons. ... Not sure if there's a fix for that. Players should group together, in games, and people, in reality.

Why does Multiblade need a target, when, like Mass Hold, it hits every opponent? Unlike Mass Hold, it even effects each opponent equally. ... Which begs the question, if I fight a group of enemies, one with sorcery resistance and one without, and I target the non-resistant one, will it insure a hit on the resistant one?

Mass Hold is a much less impressive spell than I expected it to be. When it works, it stuns about half as long as Hold, takes longer to fire, and costs over 6 times the mana.

How did I just successfully Hold something with mysticism immunity? Is the monster text wrong? Is 100% not *actually* 100% (I hate when that's the case).

I'd like to be able to sell stuff from bags instead of dig it all out, piece by piece, every freaking time.

Heh. I was hoping Psychology of a Realm Player was readable, like four or so of the other books that I found (however cut short).

Got my wizard to... some level. 35? 36? This game is such a drag.

20240926

It was 35.

I was reading about cogon grass, yesterday, and came across a Philippine expression, [ningas kugon], that apparently refers to someone that starts off strong and just as quickly peters out. I need to finish this map as a matter of character. Looks like I have some power leveling to do. Bleh.

*Now*, it's 36. I was close. :P

Mapping the roads through Wandering Woods and Zender's Woods, looking for a better place to level. These two regions are about identical. And a little out of my league. But those daemons sure are tempting. Tempting to kill, that is.

I wonder why the road dead-ends at 4157, Zender's Woods. Was it a planned north-south road to link East Leinster and Wen. It looks like it would have cut travel time by up to 50% for some pedestrians. Did the road department run out of funding? Worker strike? Daemon attacks? Probably the latter. I'm quite familiar with the latter. Every freaking screen, the latter.

I've noticed a curious glitch when getting attacked while moving. When I click just after getting attacked, and the combat screen pops up, but before the action wheel is presented, my character advances across the field. I've no idea if he'll stay there, since I always flee after than happens. I rarely fight if I don't initiate the fight. But if I were a warrior, I might want to exploit this glitch. Get the first hit in and all that. ... The glitch is probably related to server lag.

Speaking of getting attacked while moving -- things happen so sluggishly in this game. Holdover from the dial-up era? There's really little excuse for it. I played Age of Empires and StarCraft on dial-up just fine. But the lag on this game -- on my system, at least -- on a good day, is 0.2-ish seconds. That's a pretty long time in lag-terms. And if there's half a dozen monsters that want to move after I've already left a screen, my computer (it's a new, relatively powerful computer) starts winding up, processing all that apparently important NPC information. I should think updating a few (x, y) coordinates wouldn't require my processor to go 100%. So, old, funky programming, I'm guessing, in the culprit.

Traced the road through the Wandering Woods to Asgard. Both these regions are bust, for now. Looks like I'll have to go back to Emerald Forest, and possibly explore the dungeons in it.

At this point in the game -- at least with multiple enemy groups -- I've been getting more utility out of Fake Invisibilty and Summon Pixie than the questionably useful Mass Hold. It's nice that mysticism resistance isn't a thing with this combo. ... I bet it'd even work well fighting 1500 hp Ogres Chiefs where, even if I could get a Hold working, I couldn't deal out enough Multiblade damage to finish them. ... Which means, Daemons and Devils, perhaps. Daemons have a ranged attack, though, so probably not, until I can get a tougher summon.

Someone in chat asked for sorcery spellbook locations. The player got sent a magic mail. Wouldn't it be nice to have a map with the grids highlighted? I think so.

Alright... I can kill a devil. Took an army of faeries, though. And the devil was like "Surprise, I have RPG vampirism" -- which made it take that much longer. Got nearly 6000 exp from that fight, though. :)

So why is the troll king the shortest troll. ... And how can he cause earthquakes -- is that why he's king? These guys are awful to fight, and they're not worth the effort.

Fighting monsters that resurrect is annoying. Losing a turn because the guy I targeted died before I got to attack also sucks. Reminds me of the first Final Fantasy.

42. Not really "power" leveling, but I got distracted with mapping. Well... mapping is my intent, so...

20240927

I noticed that the spell projectile graphics are dependent on my character's facing. My summoned creatures that are located past the target (the target being between us) have their spell graphics firing backwards. That's something that would have annoyed the crud out of me if it were my game. 

Daemons walk funny.

Just fought a devil that was apparently wielding a mythril mace. "This one should wreck my faeries pretty well" I thought. Nope. His mace is softer than his hands -- and he lost his vampirism to boot. Who programmed this?

Well, Wrath of the Gods is a joke. It's supposed to do double damage to "evil" creatures. Assuming devils are evil (...), it costs five times as much as multiblade and does less damage on average -- and that's with it doing *double* damage. And the devil seems to shrug it off more often that multiblade (this, of course, could just be a fluke of random number generation). The Nymphs, however, are a clear upgrade from Faeries. They hit harder and are better punching bags -- in that they have more HP. It seems like they take as much damage from a devil smack as a Faery does.

A day or two ago, I enchanted all my gear with Empower. Definitely helps carrying loot. Finally got a high enough Spell Damage Modifier that I decided to try for a second enchantment. Nimbility is the usual go-to, but since I'm mostly eschewing charity, I decided for the shield gamut. Six or so more Dexterity might allow me to actually go first in combat, but when it doesn't, I'd rather not get thrashed by some elemental attack, which are pretty frequent. I did add Regeneration and Nimbility to the items that were missing a second enchantment, though. When I max out Meditation, I'll try for a third.

It seems odd to me that Snow Daemons use fire (especially), venom, and lightning attacks, but I've yet to see one use an ice attack.

There are a lot of monsters that I've yet to fight, either because they are "good", or because they were too strong when I was weak, and not worth the effort now that I'm (relatively) strong. However, the Spitting Cobra, here, in Wandering Woods, is still worth my effort. It seems to move remarkably far for a snake. This one also dropped a remarkable amount of loot.

Faeries Queens are nice. One annoying thing is that they summon Faeries, though, which fills up *my* summon slots. And I only get five of them.

Another grid glitch near Morias. This time, I can also give room numbers. :)

South from 1598, Wandering Woods, leads to 16145, Wexfordshire Valley when it should lead to 16144, Wexfordshire Woods.

And, to repeat the previous glitch --

West from 5204, Tasty Morsels, leads to 16144, Wexfordshire Woods, when it should lead to 16146, Wexfordshire Woods.

We see here two glitches with 16144, Wexfordshire Woods... Perhaps there is a magical sinkhole in the Realm, some resonant affliction left over from Duach's destruction of Leinster. Yes, let's pretend there's a lore thing here, and not something that actually needs to be fixed. :P

Wexfordshire Woods is a nice break from Wandering Woods. So far, only the annoying Dark Faeries to pester me, again. Got tired of getting jumped by all those damned Daemons and Devils. I mean, I was slaughtering them from Asgard (and before that) to Fallows, and then to Murias, but they would rarely leave me alone long enough to make notes on my map. And they did, originally, attack first. :p

Made it to 58.

20240928

Erased my warrior (that I barely played) and my thief (that I didn't play at all). The wizard's the only one that I'm working with.

If a monster is clicked on and Looked at, some flavor text and attributes for it are given. However, the information is spotty, at best. I've noticed with the Flame Daemon in particular that he constantly shrugs off Hold Monster when Looking gives no indication that he resists mysticism. So, in order to keep from wasting effort on recording inaccurate monster information, I'm sticking only with the low and high hitpoints numbers that I've personally witnessed. And I'm also leaving out finishing The Zoo. I cut all the other dungeons -- why leave that one?

Fallows is inhabited only by unaggressive dogs. This is a nice change from Wandering Woods. I'll see if I can actually kill one in a bit.

Curiously, where 11277, Fallows, should be, 5508, Fallows exists. It's a house with a locked door. Does it open later? Did it used to? Or is it just another idea never realized?

Again, 11264, Fallows, is replaced with 5507, Fallows -- another house with a locked door.

The layout is curiously broken further north. Another house at 5506, Fallows, where 11252, Fallows, should be. I wonder why these numbers in this series were dropped and replaced with ones in the five thousand series? Where they simply discarded? Anyway, this house's door stands wide open, but nobody is inside. The interior looks like it served as an armor and weapons shop.

Oh... my. I'd wondered where the Orcs went. In the towns of, I think, Caer Fandry, Drune, and Silverbrook, the Elves talk about how they took those lands from the Orcs, leaving no Orc towns in the Realm. But on the western edge of the world, Konge, abode of the Orcs, exists. It's a dreary place. Curiously, I haven't been jumped, yet (and I'm an Elf...). I'll come back here, later, after I'm finished mapping Fallows.

5505, Fallows. Another empty house. Door shut, but opens. Initially, I thought Fallows were the farms around Murias, but now I wonder. Some kind of sprawling ghost town? Did the Orcs have something to do with this when they were pushed west? If so, why aren't they living in these homes?

Okay, so 5504 was burned. Apparently burned so bad that the tombstones aren't even legible. But who attacked? I feel like I'm closer to Asgard than Murias, now. Was this part of the battle that the loons in Valhalla Inn were waiting for -- that apparently already happened? This game really could have profited a lot from a contiguous story that was told through the NPCs. But most of what's here feels like a series of accidents on top of a promising foundation.

Nevermind -- Konge will have to wait. Found another entrance that dumped out not onto a bunch of homeless Orcs, but a lot of ghosts. 幽霊. I wondered when I'd see something decidedly Japanese.

This is really nice being able to map a large tract of land without being interrupted by aggressive monsters. I'd hoped Invisibility would have allowed for that, but, alas, I've complained about that already. :P

5505, Fallows, has one of the largest buildings in the Realm that I've seen. Reminds me of something Southwestern, USA. Maybe Mexican. At any rate, it's locked. There's also a curious graphical glitch in Fallows that allows the dogs to walk all over the walls.

Finally. Fallows was much more sprawling than I thought it'd be. Now... how tough are these dogs?

Well, Hunters run really far. Thankfully, it missed five times in a row... 8| It can kill my faery queens as fast as I can summon them -- BUT! they thankfully aren't immune to Hold Monster. And so... after a rather lengthy fight... I got a Fenris pelt and 5281 experience points. The thing was some 350 levels higher than my wizard, and that's all I got. I'm thinking this game has some sort of experience point ceiling to keep players from leveling too quickly. That sucks -- I beat it fair and square. I think I'll be hunting elsewhere, for the time being.

Decided to circle back around to Bloodwood to at least map it. I hate these undead. You're already dead! Stay dead the second time! :P

Bloodwood has an odd numbering scheme. Feels like it was added to / modified several times.

Got to 63.

20240929

Connected the roads from Kurz and East Leinster to Drune. Boy, do I have a lot of whitespace to fill in.

The spell Remove Curse (or Curse - Remove) is apparently broken. Dispell will work, but then I have to recast Invisibility. Annoying bugs.

Finally found my way into the famous Thieve's Hole. General wisdom would have put me here a long time ago. These guys sure drop a lot of books. Am I really assaulting a thieves' den, or a scriptorium?

Enid's Safe Haven. ... Well, it certainly is safe. Even the dark faery, here, didn't pester me. It's also a complete waste of time. No idea how to get through the trap door. Don't really care.

Just killed a thief. It had a book of Pickpocketing Grand-Master. Seems appropriate.

Alrighty. Traced at least one road to Silverbook. Filled in a few holes in Devon Forest while I was at it.

While skirting the edge of Devon Forest, I happened upon Fafnir's Swamp. Wasn't expecting that. After something that looked like a Lost Soul from Doom immediately attacked me, I fled back to relative safety. Might be a while before I go back. I was naively hoping to finish this map a lot sooner.

Decided to start at Usk and, presumably, work my way down to Drune. The room numbers got me curious to go west first, though. At 12204, Winder Wold, the road turns north, yet cannot be traveled. A couple rooms west of that and I hit the Loch Murk dock. Apparently, I'm not allowed to take a ride to the isle of the dead. More lore I'm guessing nothing was done with.

Aaand, that's done. Next is Monmouth. I'm just trying to tie the cities together so that I don't have any more "floating" cities on my map. It also feels like I'm make more progress, this way. Kind of like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. I like to make a frame, anyway.

Finished. Now, apparently Arimathor has no roads through the desert. Time for a walkabout. I've decided to start in Asgard and work directly northwest.

Shit. Berserkers are in Ascetos Desert, too. There goes that plan. 

Got to level 68. Not a lot of leveling, today, but made a solid skeleton of the map. Now's all the rest... Which will require some leveling. Bleh.

20240930

Found a dungeon just outside of Despothes's Temple -- Judgment of the Scepter. This dungeon doesn't even show up on the archived web page that I'm looking at. Looks like there are 'good' and 'evil' doors; I went into the evil door, of course. Just noticed something was wrong with Wrath of the Gods -- it costs 36 mana, not the 15 mana listed in the spell book; now, it's definitely not worth what it costs. I just fought a group containing a Fury, Flame Daemon, and Daemon King -- the latter have over 12,000 hitpoints. Wondered if I was going to get screwed on experience, again. Pretty sure I did. I got 10,000 even, which seems suspicious. I'm wondering if that's the max allowed per battle, since that's what's required for a level up.

Wait... I just noticed that summoning a Faery Queen cost 48 mana instead of 20. Is it this dungeon?

Yeap, another 10,000 experience point reward. There has to be a lame cap. This game amazed me when I was a kid. This game is not amazing.

What the hell is up with the lava snake? I'm invisible and there are five faeries to choose from, but it made a beeline for me and never stopped attacking. This game is so damned janky. And this dungeon feels never ending. And it's not helping me map the overworld at all. And there was no loot! Leaving.

Back in the Wandering Woods; Summon Faery Queen now costs 50 mana instead of 20. What the hell is wrong with this game? Restarted the game; no change. Noticed Light Dart also costs 2 instead of 1. Extension and Greater Invisibility haven't changed price. I'm not wearing an amulet of magic -- even then, the cost shouldn't keep increasing. Hold hasn't changed, but Multiblade costs 7 instead of 3. It's like select spells have 2.5x cost multiplier on them, but I'm not wearing anything that should incur that. This game is just borked.

Remember me whining (more than once) about a safety-timer after leaving a safe zone? tTere should also be one after exiting a battle (for any reason).

Summon Faery Queen now costs 51 mana. What gives? Select spells scale to... player level? The game logic is crap. If that's the case, at least state it plainly. Or, at the very least, update the cost in the spell book.

Apparently, according to old records, some monsters specifically "see invisible". This is a misnomer, since everything can see invisible in this game. In this case, however, it means that it won't be distracted.

Looking at an old bestiary, I'm having considerable doubts about finishing this map. All of these high level enemies that were tacked on at some point are making completion rather prohibitive without me spending many dull hours grinding levels, or, even less likely, grouping with some level 1000 veteran who won't mind the boring task of trekking across every tile on the surface of this island.

... After realizing the disappointment of Invisibility, I should have reconsidered my options then. If I can't be Invisible, then what? Clearly, I need to be able to act first, so that I can run first, and the character best suited for that would be the All Dexterity Elf Thief. If he can't do it, no one can. So it's decided. I've spent 80 levels on my wizard, but, according to Steppenwolf, it's never to late to start all over again.

I amused myself with naming my thief Gilgamesh. In Final Fantasy 5, there was an antagonist of the same name. Many years ago, I read a web comic, on rpgclassics.com, by an Orakio, in which this character said something along of the lines of "I'm the fastest runner in Final Fantasy", since he constantly ran from the protagonists when he was near defeat. But I went with a different name. I went with a "neutral" alignment, this time, hoping that.. well... nothing would attack me. :D Haha. It seems more likely that everything will, now. Also, just to test this theory before spending resources on enchanting equipment, I'm going to run buck naked from Arimathor straight south, presumably into Fallows. If successful, I will also finish my map skeleton that the wizard wasn't up to.

SUCCESS! HAH! Run, thief, run! :D Well, the snakes and daemon-kin still think my neutral character looks tasty, the aforementioned bane of my wizard's mapping expedition, the Berserker, apparently pays my thief absolutely no attention. I even ran circles around one for a while -- no bite. One even preferred to look "for a cobbler", rather than engage in combat with me. Why was he looking for a shoe repairer? Why was he even in the desert. Since he was peaceful enough, I actualy got to Look At one of them for the first time. I was rewarded with this mess.

"Berserker, a giant from the distant mountains who has come to the lowlands in search of replacements for the too-tight$".

too-tight$? ... I'm going to assume that $ is some broken code that might finish "too-tight boots that his grandma gave him last Christmas but never quite fit right. He figures if he gets them fixed out of town, he can avoid the embarrassment of his grandma finding out about it. It's for this reason that he walked out of the mountains in them, but he regrets not bringing his old pair to change into." Or something.

As for the things that *did* attack me, my thief *did* get the initiative and was able to flee before the antagonists got to even act. This is good news -- very good news. I think I will enchant everything with Nimbility just to get as much of an edge as possible. Finishing this map is looking very promising all of the sudden. But I'm going to bed.

20241001

Time to take my thief out for a spin. Going to steal the world.

"Berserker lifts a foot and shakes it." Apparently a signal of dominance. At least I got that much, I guess. New data. One, Berserkers still attack (seemingly) unprovoked. Two, my 25 Dexterity thief is still too slow to act first in battle with a Berserker -- the action wheel doesn't even pop up. I'm wondering if it's still a matter of dexterity, or if the developers simply gave the Berserker a "move first" bonus. Guess it's time to put on those enchanted clothes.

Alrighty. Not quite max, but let's see what 36 Dexterity will do for my thief.

Well... Kind of shot myself in the foot. Didn't do the math and mythril armor weighed me down too much. Lost the initiative, period. Curiously, ran past two Berserkers with no problems.

"Berserker shifts his eyes wildly as he tugs at his boots."

"Berserker bares his teeth and snarls."

If I spend enough time with these creatures, I may start to understand them. For now, I'm going to go spend several more thousand mana enchanting lighter equipment...

Okay, only 7% encumberment. Take 3.

Nope. It took a while for a Berserker to finally notice me, but when he did, BANG. He gets the first move, period, apparently. I could try to scrounge up a couple other items devoted to dexterity to see if I could finally outrun the Berserker, but it'd probably be a waste of effort. At level one, it seems my thief doesn't drop anything on death -- though, knowing what I know now, I probably could have just remained naked. However bumpy this ride may be, I think that this endeavor will be better than trying to do it with my wizard.

Alrighty. Mapped Konge. Noticed a few things. All the ghosts and skeletons get the first move (though, unlike with the Berserkers, I at least got to see the action wheel), but the former cast shift and the latter just walked a few feet before I could flee, so no problems. The dead patrol the top of Konge, while the orcs wander the south. With names like Bandit, Thug, and Warlord, the Orcs are surprisingly docile. Still no idea why they're squatting in the dim west. At the western extreme, there is the ruined village of Horsham. Are the dead its former occupants? Did the Orcs have anything to do with it? Will there ever be an answer? This, and more, at 8. There were also no dungeons in Konge -- unless they were behind those locked doors.

Evil Bees are definitely faster than my thief. And so evil.

Got most of the desert south of Arimathor mapped. Logged back in with my wizard to put numbers to Leinster, North and West Havenwood, and the part of Emerald Forest I'd left undone. I'm tired of getting attacked every other screen.

Somebody left stacks of 50,000 mana crystals on the ground in the Ivory Moon Cafe -- the place where all the Realm veterans gather. I doubt I'll be casting many more spells, but I availed myself of four stacks, anyway. :P I'll give back what's left of them when I finish my map. :)

Going back over these old parts, I'm actually noticing distinctions in the background that foreshadow a change in region. I still think it should be more obvious. Who ever comes back to these old places? That's part of the problem with generic RPGs. An area shouldn't lose its relevance. There should be a reason for "high level" players to return to their roots (assuming they didn't get crazy head starts). How? Less area, perhaps. But that might not scale well with many players. But simply making a larger map doesn't solve the problem, since there will likely only be a few spots that the majority of players care to gather in. Let's consider the monster hunk of real estate that Ascetos Desert is. ... Actually, I'm tired. I want to finish at least tacking these numbers onto Havenwood, tonight. Emerald Forest can wait.

I wonder how many misprints I'm going to discover when I go to parse this thing.

20241002

Alright, finished adding room numbers to Emerald Forest. Back to the running thief.

Decided to probe the eastern border of Ascetos Desert, simultaneously probing the western border of Northern Steppes. Far enough north, and I crossed into the borders of Ascetos Deep Desert and Crystal Mountains. First time for that. Decided to turn back and fill in the Northern Steppes.

The Northern Steppes are pretty peaceful -- until a gargoyle randomly decides to jump me. They're loonier than the berserkers, apparently, but much slower, so that I'm able to run away. The gargoyle flavor text suggests that they're "good" aligned, so I don't get why they randomly, and rarely, attack "good" and "neutral" characters.

And that's Northern Steppes. It was nice only getting attacked every 20 screens instead of every two (or less). Now I'll cover Crystal Mountains while probing the eastern edge of Ascetos Deep Desert.

Looking at a Green Crystal, I got --

"You just looked at an object without a description!"

-- That is a description, kind of. I'm guessing that this might be a very poor placeholder that a developer made that should have thrown an error instead.

And that was the Crystal Mountains. I think I got attacked here more than in Ascetos Desert. Guess I'm about to test that theory -- there's still a lot of desert to cover.

Alright -- I've circumnavigated Ascetos Desert! Now, I just got to fill it in... Ultimately, what seems to have "saved" me was being level 1. I apparently can't lose anything until I attain level 3. Berserkers are still damned annoying, though.

I just noticed in the chat box that something as yet unseen is called a Stinging Fury. I wonder if it's an invisible creature. I don't think I've ever cast See Invisible, so, if there are -- and it does stand to reason that there are -- invisible creatures, my uncomprehensive list of enemies per region is that much less comprehensive. Either than, or some monster has two names -- which is just as likely with this game.

Stopped off for some food and drink at The Scimitar Tavern. Just realized that my thief doesn't have Cornucopia.

Alright, got the desert from Arimathor down. I'm going to bed.

20241003

It was... "nice" breaking up the mapping with the fighting, previously. At any rate, it was at least a different flavor. I can't fight with my thief unless I want to lose the level 1 "bonus". It definitely feels like I've been traveling through a desert. Without a horse, named or otherwise.

The coppice of burnt trees was interesting, but feels out of place

I still don't get these overstocked "wilderness shops". Who trucks all this crap out to the middle of nowhere? Who actually shops here? Why don't the shopkeepers talk? When pretty much every character learns the Home spell as soon as possible -- essentially being a much less expensive version of Teleport, since gatekeepers are near houses -- who'd actually go looking for these places just to sell off loot? Nothing makes sense, except to break up the monotony of these wilderness areas. If this was styled as an inn (just because they sell food and drink, the interior of these shops clearly aren't inns), *that* would make sense -- but not general stores that look more like auction houses or chapels. These tents have really high ceilings, too. This seems even more absurd in the desert. Speaking of which, where is the wind, the sand storms, the dunes? It's more like this is a giant, overly calm beach -- in spite of the overpopulation of bloodthirsty monsters.

Another wilderness shop. Since I'm here, what's up with the exceedingly overpriced dyes? 5,250,000 gold for one of light orange, flesh, or light flesh dye? Is this something simply for rich, over-leveled, end-game characters to blow money on? "We gotta sell them something, boss! They got all this money and no way to spend it!"

First time I got crushed by the same Berserker just after getting up. At least I think it was the same -- I wasn't paying much attention. ... And while I was writing this, another (different, this time, I'm sure) Berserker whacked me for the third time in a row.

Wow. A wilderness shop with an NPC that actually speaks. The dialogue is as bad as ever, but it is the first NPC I've gotten words out of since I finished mapping the towns days (years!) ago. The text is, of course, unbelievable as ever. His response to "How can I find my way back to town?" should have been, "What? You don't have the Home spell?" I noticed that his stools are also arranged slightly differently than the rest of the wilderness shop. Yes, this place really stands out amongst the wilderness shops, a real pearl among... slightly duller pearls. Of course, he doesn't actually have any of the other wares besides food and drink. No special food and drink, mind, so still a worthless location. And one still has to ask, "Where did he get it?" Did the she-wolf teach him how to ferment and distill the local flora? Or is it made from monster flesh? And, if so, why did he give the items the same names as the generic crap that I can get from the other bars in the Realm? Does he actually need to be worried about the Realm Food Safety Department way the hell out here?

Talking in chat, it's apparently the "helmet of the berserker" that enables the Berserker to strike first. I knew it had to be some kind of nonsense. 

Blegh. Finally finished the desert. Still have a couple more deserts to do, but I'm going to go somewhere greener, next. I think I'll finish mapping Wandering Woods.

20241004

For a while now I've been amused about how off the gatekeeper / teleport map is.

About to finish Wandering Woods, when I remembered that I never even stepped foot into Ascetos Caverns. Curiously, this is where the Tracking teacher resides. Tracking, like healing, is, of course, unimplemented. What's more, Sandor refers us to a place that doesn't exist to buy the first couple Tracking books. The curious thing is that this place has all the stink of a dungeon, but all it is is a useless NPC.

Just found The Supply Store West -- the one-stop shop for all things crafting. At least, that's presumably was it *was*. Beral gives some pretty lame text that sounds like a cop-out from the developers who were probably attempting to "balance" the Realm economy. No big deal, for me. However, I could have bought a lot of rat poop for a joke I had in mind, days ago, that I no longer care to pull off, now.

While I was mapping Wexfordshire Valley, I decided to hug the edge of the island rather that continue to fill in broader spaces. Ran into The Wild Beyond for the first time. Feels a lot like Bloodwood.

At 4523, The Wild Beyond, the road forks west and south. Both paths dead end at the edge of the map, but the west fork is rather egregious in that the road butts right up against the edge of the screen. It's bad enough that it's a road to nowhere -- no park, no port, nothing. But to just hit the edge of the screen like there's something beyond that point is just sloppy.

Another goofy dead end road at 4590, The Downs.

Made it around the "coast" to Monmouth. Keep going around the coast, or fill in some stuff? That's two crappy choices.

4786, The Wild Beyond -- another road that just dead ends in the middle of nowhere. Roads (if made well) take a lot of work to make. Why does this road end in the middle of nowhere. There are no ruins anywhere, no signs of former habitation. Either the map maker missed something, or he just thought it "looked cool" to stop a road for no other reason.

4658, The Supply Store East. Apparently Beral has an identical twin, with an identical name, with a shop that sells identical items in an identical cave. Now, I tend to like the absurd, but this goes a little too far -- probably because this game has already soured heavily to me since I started playing. The nostalgia is still here, because I played it during the time of a sweet friendship -- but this game is crap. At least this Beral had a different reason for being here.

4382, Zender's Woods -- another screen-edge dead end that isn't a map edge. These map abnormalities are many.

There's a curious hole in the map where Zender's Woods, The Wild Beyond, Devon Forest, The Downs, and Fafnir's Swamp all intersect -- some nine cells that I traveled all the way around and probed from every direction and didn't find an opening. I don't know if something is actually there than can be teleported to, something that's actually there that's been accidentally cut off, or something that's just absurdly missing. I've looked at a couple different old maps, and they don't offer much insight into the hole.

Ah, but wait, I did find a world map that shows the same hole, but it's missing the Crystal Mountains region, as well as Fallows and Konge. Apparently when this version was stitched together, someone tried to offer the biggest version of the Realm.

I'm getting tired of trying to note the highest and lowest values of each enemy type in each region. I'm just listing what I find, now. Sometimes, there might not even be a number. But I'll try to write at least one. :p

Fafnir's Swamp is the dullest, most unlikely square-shaped swamp I've ever witnessed, full of curiously docile dragons, sentient garbage, and an extant tribe of those Lost Souls from DOOM. The Legendary Swamp Dragon apparently has so many hitpoints that a number wasn't even shown on my screen. At least I got attacked a lot less that the places I've been traveling in lately.

Found a couple curiosities. One, The Dragon Pit, a dungeon located at 29065, Dungeon Entry. Not sure why it wasn't still labeled Fafnir's Swamp. Went in, just to look (but not explore). One of the old sites doesn't even list the dungeon, and the other has an unfinished map. I'm guessing it was one of the later additions -- the room numbers suggest that. Two, 29043, Fafnir's Swamp. There's a sign here that says "No Swimming". Thing is, the graphics on this page are busted, and the "pool" tile is actually being covered up by a tile that it's suppose to be covering. It looks absurd. :p

20241005

Finished Bloodwood and Forest of Death. The numbering scheme is still bizarre. Why is the Forest of Death split in half -- 12000 through 12049 and 12100 through 12149?

12314, Winter Wold -- another screen-edge road to nowhere. I really wish the developers gave a damn about how absurd this looks.

Finally experienced some of the "rubberbanding" that I've heard about. 12301, Winder Wold. The cursor turns into an arrow as if I can move north, but trying to do so literally bounces my character backwards after touching the top of the screen.

12435, Winter Wold -- another screen-edge dead end. Winter Wold seems terribly botched.

As I was saying, 12295, Winter Wold -- another screen-edge dead end.

As I muse about geography some more, looking at what's complete of my map so far, I see three rivers leading into Ascetos Desert. Now, in real life, the main path of a river usually gets stronger until it hits some larger body of water -- usually the ocean. The Mississippi, Nile, Yangtze, and Amazon are very obvious elements among a much larger set. Granted, all of the rivers in the Realm can be stepped over. The map maker probably thought the world would look weird (it probably would) without rivers, so some were added. They're unimpressive and generally just unnecessarily impede progress since the developers don't actually let characters walk across them, making them ford at predetermined spots. There are also no bridges anywhere, apart from some planks where roads and rivers intersect. Nor mountains (in spite of some names and background images). The world is quite truly flat. Yet these rivers flow. These magical, tiny rivers. Anyway, what I was implying originally was that they should flow through the desert. The Nile, for instance, doesn't stop. In fact, the Nile is what keeps part of Egypt from being a complete desert. Yet these three magical Realm rivers just putter out shortly after entering Ascetos desert. They just... stop. No swamp, or quicksand, or impressive display of rapid vaporization -- not even an apparent abyss conveniently swallowing them up. They just stop being rivers. Just another absurdity in this game.

Where are rooms 12248 and 12249?

Winter Wold done.

The Berserkers in The Barrens might be the most aggressive I've met with -- and they have the least hitpoints. Maybe they're trying to compensate for lack of vitality.

And that's The Barrens. Boy, am I tired of Berserkers. Hopefully, The Badlands don't have Berserkers.

It's funny listening to the vets in chat talking about ye olde days.

Found my way into The Maze. Apparently, it's a dungeon that doesn't have the typical dungeon entrance -- sarcophagus, tent, hollow tree, or cave entrance. Just walk straight up from 12100, Forest of Death. Yet, walking one up from 27088, The Maze Entrance, is a one-way trip. So, I'm classifying this as a dungeon and not mapping it. Curiously, after getting thrashed by a pack of Gremlins, I decided to opt for the Go Home option. Curiously, I'm still under Myst Immunity. Pretty sure that should pass once outside of battle -- especially after dying and being resurrected.

The Killing Fields was pleasantly small. It also had a small variety of monsters (five) that I've seen elsewhere. What's the point? Why not just extend a region instead of adding a new one that isn't new?

Alright, The Badlands weren't so bad. Only the occasional Kilrog to avoid, a King Kilrog, and a half-beaten-to-death Hell Snake. In fact, it was the only Hell Snake that I saw. Weird. I'm guessing the roads are hard to distinguish because of the unkempt nature of the "badlands". Pretty sure there's supposed to be a road running between 13230, The Badlands, and 2919, The Badlands, but there's not. Don't know if that was because of the jump in numbers and someone forgot to draw them in, or misspliced them, or if it simply is supposed to be missing to give it that *look*. Also looks like a road is supposed to go south from 13267, The Badlands, but 13275, The Badlands, give no evidence that a road was ever there. There's also a squiggly road that terminates at 13201, The Badlands. No idea where that goes. On the teleport map, the sea. Maybe somebody used to have a house on the cliffs. Whatever. I can chalk all this up to the region being in ruins. What I found most strange was the fact that none of the roads lead to the Temple of Finvarra...

Whelp, that's enough for today. 

20241006

While I appreciate not being attacked at all in Drear Valley, this region has the stupidest theme in all of the Realm.

It still amazes me that none (that I immediately recall) of these tiles are coastal tiles. It's like the developers never wanted to actually terminate an edge of the screen, just in case they were later inclined to expand the area (which feels like it happened several times). But the feeling is that of being trapped, not on an island, but in a story book. Maybe that's what they were going for, but it feels *too* artificial.

DeSol Tib's Wilderness Shop is the only wilderness shop with a reasonable looking interior.

Apart from the Berserkers in the deserts, The Wild Beyond has the most aggressive little bastards in the Realm. Every other freaking tile I have to stop and deal with some asshole picking a fight. Those irritating Dark Faeries just add insult to injury. And the numbering scheme in this region also has to be the most chopped up and ridiculous.

Took a detour to finish filling in Zender's Woods.

Nevermind. Zaliki's Wilderness Shop also offers a nice variation that isn't a podium and six stools. Zaliki clearly needs a vent in the tent, though.

And that's The Wild Beyond. I think I'll cross over Wexfordshire Valley to fill in the rest of Wandering Woods, then finish Wexfordshire Valley. I'd rather finish without being attacked.

And that's that. :)

20241007

I opened this project, today, and felt a particular relief at the realization that I didn't need to map anything -- that my tedious, self-imposed obligation was complete. At least, that part of it was. :p

I did clean up the colors I gave to the regions, though. I tried to give them a gradient that suggested relative difficulty. I didn't actively hunt in all of the areas, so there's some guess work. Also, I think I reused a color or two. Really, I just wanted it to look more topographical than thematic.

The map is certainly simple in construction. Each cell only has a single color. The color I chose I considered to be the most important feature of that cell. The list, most important at the top, goes something like this:

teleporter
dungeon
building
town square
road
river
region color

There are a couple dungeons in towns. There are buildings in the wilderness. Roads cross rivers. These underlying things simply have to be overlooked on a simple map. Also, there are a few dungeons that don't have any enemies in them, but I didn't distinguish between them.

... I noticed some discrepancies in the numbers -- specifically, East Havenwood. I had to go back in, after all, to check. Yeap, I'd mistyped a few cells.

I noticed another discrepancy in Winder Wold; I had the same room number for two rooms. Again, my mistake.

And another in Leinster / Kurz Road...

Wandering Woods might be on par with The Wild Beyond in the way of ridiculous room numbering.

Noticed I had left the common name off of one of the tiles.

20241008

I decided to go with an HTML table. This map might not *semantically* be a table, but it should make things easier for me.

Curiously, LibreOffice Calc -- the program that I used to make the map -- has an option to convert the ODS file to an HTML file. I gave that a try. ... And it makes some damned ugly code. Or markup. Or whatever you want to call it. I'm calling it [code]. There's some 8829 tiles to this map, converted to <td>, with each td implicitly stating alignment when that could have been covered by CSS. And why is the cell information given to a data-sheets-value attribute instead of just being pasted into the cell? Maybe there's a good reason for it, but it seems silly, to me. The first cell in each row is also implicitly given a height attribute -- another thing that CSS should handle. Maybe it has something to do with HTML version support. Or browser compatibility, or is just an assumption made by the developer. I don't know. But I think it'd take more work to fix this, than to parse the spreadsheet and make my own HTML file.

Here's my plan, of sorts:

each tile parsed in such a way that
   each td is given an id based on room number
   each td is given a class based on background color; make sure the text color contrasts well with the background color
   the respective room number is the content of each td, but it is initially hidden; this can be toggled

a javascript object modified by each tile such that
   a key is made from each room number
   the rest of the information is a cell is treated by
      making a string from the first argument / CSV after the room number; this is the common name
      making an array out of the rest of the arguments; arrays may be nested

strings from the object will be converted to HTML hs

arrays from the object will be converted to HTML lists

regional information from another file will be added to relevant keys as strings and arrays

off-site links to dungeon maps will also be added to relevant keys as strings to be turned into anchors

make the map "zoomable" by letting the user actively change the cell dimensions, this way the map is kept separate from the textual information and the browser-level zoom can be used in conjunction

20241009

Curiously, the ODS file is a ZIP file. Inside this file is the context.xml file that has all of the information that I'm looking for. Python's standard library is enough for my needs.

As for the ODS file, interpreting it isn't difficult. Each row starts with 

<table:table-row>

and each column / cell starts with

<table:table-cell>

I guess for some good reason, empty cells are taken account of by

table:number-columns-repeated="n"

n being a number, of course. I have to mind that when making the HTML tables, and add an appropriate number of empty cells.

My assumption about each cell being given a background color explicitly was wrong. Here, they're each given a 'style' that very much resembles a CSS class

<table:table-cell table:style-name="s">

s being a string. The strings seem arbitrary, to me. For example the first one that I came across -- "ce21" -- applies to the first colored cell in the top row. Its address, as listed in the Name Box in LibreOffice Calc, though, is AO1 -- that is, column AO, row 1. CE21 is an empty cell. Oh well -- whatever the method behind it, it's easy enough to extract and make sensible (to me) to convert it to CSS.

... Actually, as I looked over it some more, I noticed the code [table:default-cell-style-name="ce2"]. Sure enough, all of the cell styles start with "ce". 

The rest of the information that I need is found between <text:p> and </text:p>. I'll still have to parse that according to the CSV-ish way that I recorded the room information.

20241011

I have too many chores during the day.

Had some "fun" figuring out how to parse this thing. findall() kept throwing an error because I apparently couldn't figure out how to get the XML namespace thing right. It's terrible when something looks like it should work but doesn't. What do you do? There are a few options. Working alone and generally preferring to struggle over asking for help means that I copied the XML file, deleted all the namespace and prefix portions, as well as all the resulting duplicate attributes, and several other unnecessary tags, and was left with a much smaller and cleaner XML file. And parsing worked beautifully, then. :D It's terrible how ugly things get when complication becomes (seemingly) necessary. I could also say that it's ugly how terrible things get. Anyway...

... And I thought I had it. I noticed half of the <td>s were missing classes. Looked back at the XML and, yeap, no styles for those cells. "Why?" I asked myself. Looked back at the pre-hacked XML and noticed that the table-column tags had default-cell-style-name attributes. The cells that don't have an explicit style -- that is, those that don't differ from the default-cell-style-name -- take this implicit style. And each table-column can have a different default-cell-style-name. ... So I'm borked, for now. Maybe I will go back and look at the exported HTML and see if I'd rather hack it than keep track of what column I'm on. But I'm turning this off, for now.

20241012

It's always fun thinking that a job is going to be much easier only to find out that my depth of ignorance makes it much harder. Of course, by the time it's finished, my initial assessment sometimes proves correct -- but it proves correct for a false future me in the past.

At any rate, I'm getting better with regular expressions... because I'm having difficulty understanding the XML and HTML parsers that come with Python, as well as some other libraries that I've been looking at, namely Beautiful Soup and lxml.

It's amazing how much work it takes to try to do less work.

I've been trying to build a JavaScript object this whole time... and now I doubt its utility. Why not just use the text that's already in the <td>s? Why duplicate all of this stuff? Now, my plan is to give each <td> an onclick attribute that calls a JavaScript function, passing as an argument the id of that <td>. Or should I pass innerHTML? From there, the info box can be populated with the information that's in (but hidden) the cell. I think I'd like to put the room numbers in a <span> so that they can be toggled on and off easily -- all room numbers will be affected. Not sure how individually toggling them would serve any useful purpose.

20241019

Hadn't felt like doing any programming after work, this week. 

Looks like my previous idea about hidden text was either naive, or I'm missing something. Either way, looks like I'll be sticking that into a <td> attribute after all, and, to make things simpler, just leaving the room number visible.

This definitely suffered from "feature creep". I'm going to cull most of it, right now. Maybe some will be added back.

Finally. I have a working prototype. :D Again, more than anything, I've unintentionally improved my skill with regular expressions, both in Notepad++ and with the Python re module. Heh.

I initially thought to make a square grid... but the numbers, of course (by default) stretch the td elements. I could do something like overflow: hidden, but then that would look silly. And, fittingly enough, the game screen is, in fact, rectangular. The Realm is a bunch of slabs, not squares, so I think I'll leave it. :p

Yes! And now I have a functional map. Alright. Next is the function that populates the info box that pops up when a cell is clicked.

20241020

Played around with the info boxes and buttons, trying to get them to look reasonable. The browser's scaling features throws everything off. Maybe I'll have to make the map click-drag-able and use the mouse wheel to zoom. And, no, I'm not considering mobile-responsive use at all. I don't believe The Realm has a mobile version, and may never -- at least not Despothes's Grove. I also just realized that the launcher for the game lists it as [Despothes Grove] -- yet another spelling to go with Despothes's Grove and Despothes' Grove.

Just filled in all of the categories for the category box -- a set of items that can be clicked on to highlight spots on the map where they can be found. Realized that I misspelled [wooden] as "wooen" several times. There're probably even more errors.

Yeap, just noticed some silly errors like "iron steel" instead of [iron, steel] and "tempered, steel" instead of [tempered steel].

Alright. I think I got the info boxes working like I want. As in, off and on. I still have to populate the box with the specific cell's information when clicked.

20241021

I just realized that I made things difficult for myself by the way that I separated items in the cells. And I'm tired. I'll work on this later.

20241026

Looks like I'll be making that object, after all. It's just too cluttered without it. It'd also make it easier to update. ... Pfft. Like I have any intention of doing that. :p It'd also be an easy way to incorporate this regional enemy info that I compiled (however incomplete). Yeap... Yeap, that's what I'll do. This is a learning experience, Josh. Learn away.

Also thinking about how to use the category box that I prepared. Seems I'll need to make another object with the relevant cell ids in an array, ascribed to each category, and a function to go with it that modifies the CSS. What to do about unselecting and restoring the cells' CSS? Some other array?

20241027

Yay, more regular expression practice. (: I really didn't expect to do this this much when I started this project. Not complaining -- this is probably an essential programmer's tool. It's just like I said -- I didn't expect it to, seemingly, be what I used the most to alter the data that I'd recorded while playing the game. I suppose if I'd recorded the data differently...

Dude, my Internet connection is crap, today.

Well, I got the map zooming in what I feel is something of a hack-y way.

Got some very clunky map dragging functionality going on.

Ah, figured out what was so clunky -- when the mouse cursor leaves the map, onmouseup doesn't fire. If I start the "drag" outside of the table, and end inside of it, then it goes crazy. Also, cells can be selected when a drag is started from outside the table -- something undesirable. Still wondering if I'm going to have to use a canvas after all -- or do I just say "screw it" and leave it clunky?

20241104

Life's circumstances have been bumpy, lately.

Someone looking at the source code, might wonder why I put all of it (html, css, and javascript) into one file instead of dividing them. I'll go with "portability". One file is fewer than three. It's all in one place. It's not that big, and the three sections are clearly separated within the file. If you, dear reader, want to do it differently, go right ahead. :p

Added the region to each of the cells. This is something that I should have done initially, and I blame my lack of experience. Thankfully, it was easy to do programmatically. I'd feel sorry for the guy that'd have to do each entry by hand.

Noticed several rogue cell ids after I sorted them (by integer, ascending). All these little errors. Also noticed several more breaks in continuity that I'm pretty sure I had nothing to do with -- for instance, cells 1248 and 1249 are missing from Wandering Woods. I say this because 1250 and onward exist. Again, with 4149. No idea why it's skipped, unless the developer just wanted to start the top-left block of cells with a round number (4150). Actually, this has happened many times -- like with Leinster / Kurz road going from 13014 to 13100. It just seemed (extra) odd, this time.

Great, and now I'm second-guessing myself. Again. I really don't feel like double-checking all these room numbers... And I don't think that I will. If I try not to make sense of them, they are "ordered", taken as a sample. In any case, the next guy shouldn't have a hard time correcting my mistake, if there is one (or a dozen... or a hundred).

Just noticed the odd room numbers for Fallows -- that I noted before -- are between the room numbers for Silverbrook and Caer Fandry -- clearly, "city" numbers. Even though they're quite spread out in the Fallows, they do resemble town squares. I still wonder what their story was. 

Also find it curious that the 5700 series is missing. I wonder if there was a city planned for that -- or removed. The entire 6000 - 6900 series is also missing. I note this, because another city follows in the 7000 series. 7200 is also missing, and Drune wraps up the cities with 7300. All very curious.

I also find it curious that Horsham is part of the Konge numbering system when it clearly looks like it should -- according to convention -- have 4-digit room numbers. I figure this was one of the last cities added in the many iterations of the Realm. Or maybe by someone with a different view to order. ... Or maybe the same guy that changed his mind about how to order (or forgot how he did things previously...).

Amusingly, while checking the map against my typing mistakes, I think I don't particularly like my clunky zooming and dragging features. :D I think I'll just add some zoom buttons and see how that works out. But that's after I'm done checking this data.
 
Alright. Glad I decided to sort and visually look through all 5689 entries. I made somewhere around 20-25 rather embarrassing errors. :P
 
Since I added the region to each cell, I've made it easier on myself about highlighting the potential regional monsters. I didn't make a very thorough list for reasons specified previously. However, the facility is there for the next guy to modify. Also, being able to highlight all the areas with a specific monster would be a nice feature, but I'm not going to touch that one at all. It wouldn't take much work (maybe), but, as I've said, my list isn't great, and I'm winging it enough as it is.
 
20241105
 
I changed my mind about splitting up the files. After adding these objects, that's just too much.

Ended up doing a fair amount of editing by hand. "Fair" being something like 5% of the 5000+ entries. Still...

Okay, [5%] was a wild guess that was fairly accurate. 265 / 5689 = 0.04658112... :P

I still wonder how many errors I'll (unintentionally) leave in this when I upload it to the Internet.

In adding links to off-site maps of the dungeons, I noticed that The Zoo does *not*, in fact, list all of the monsters in the Realm. This doesn't surprise me. Whoever updated the game in its various iterations failed to keep the zoo current. 

Just found a weird typo where [mythril] was several times replaced with [throwing]. ... No idea when that happened. Most likely some kind of max text replacement -- unless I was just having a very "off" moment.

20241106

I noticed an error of the "blanket" kind. For whatever reason, rooms with dungeon entrances don't have enemies outside the doors. No idea why. I should figure strongholds of all sorts would post guards -- but not in the Realm. However, on my map, since I gave each cell a "region" attribute, the info box lists potential enemies for rooms that would otherwise have them. ... So, do I check for a "dungeon" attribute? For town regions, I simply included the "none" attribute for the object. This seemed reasonable, and clean enough. But this dungeon solution...

Alright, that was mostly painless. Had to re-categorize a few places as dungeons that weren't really dungeons (in my mind), but now tiles that have no monsters don't list potential monsters in the info box. Yay. :D

... Just realized that the temples also show potential monsters when monsters don't spawn in them. That means that I'll have to add new regions to the monsterless_regions list. Though this feels like a hack.

Hack or not, the problem is "fixed".

Alright! Looks like the info box is finished. Now, to finish the category box so that the map will highlight the items clicked on. This will require another object -- at least, that's how I'm going about it. Also have to do something about resetting the CSS in the altered cells. Then there's the question of what to do about deselecting all cells. Should I even care? Yes, I should care. But *will* I provide a solution? We shall see.

I just noticed that some teachers aren't accounted for, namely, axes, pickpocketing, two-handed swords, unarmed combat, and weapon smithing -- unless I missed something (which has been proven quite possible). Not that that matters, since fetch quests are crap in general -- and especially so in this game.

Of course, I wasn't satisfied with this, so I checked the dusty tomes for any indication of where these teachers *should* be. Now, the answers that I got were clearly from a different version of the game, but the answers were somewhat telling. My guess is that whoever cobbled this version together unintentionally broke something, or intentionally left them out. Anyway, this is what I found:

The Axe Teacher should be in Wen Weapons of Wen, but isn't.
The Pickpocketing Teacher is completely absent, even in the ancient records.
The Two-Handed Swords Teacher should be in House of Combat of Monmouth, but isn't.
The Unarmed Combat Teacher is completely absent, even in the ancient records.
The Weapon Smithing Teacher is completely absent, even in the ancient records.

So... yeah, at least I (presumably) didn't overlook them. :)

I decided to leave the clunky map dragging feature as-is.

20241107

Got the category highlighting feature satisfactory enough.

... And it's done. Checked it in Firefox, Chrome, and Edge, and everything seems to check out.

Seems like this took too long for what little I feel that I've actually done. Many hours were spent crisscrossing the Realm recording data. A few hours were spent shoring up my knowledge of various web languages and solving functionality problems. A few minutes were spent trying to get it to "look right". Yet, I question how much I've actually *done*. And for what? A map for a game that I won't play again? A map that I made in order to quiet that feeling of nostalgia so that I *wouldn't* revisit it? Haha. Well, in any case, it's finished. For me, at any rate. Now, to upload it to Github and to tell the other Realmers about it, let come what may.

I had ideas for a couple of other things. I was going to do a character generator that shows clearly what to expect from a certain build. This is nice for any "RPG", since, most of the time, it's quite unclear what to expect in the long run, or even from attributes in general. I remember Jeff Vogel from Spiderweb Software making a similar complaint, once, and it was a smart complaint. But most of what I have I scraped from another source, and it's missing stuff. I think I'll just leave my notes in a file and let the next guy figure it out. Also have a list of text commands for the game. Maybe a couple more files. I think I'll just upload the extra and close this chapter.

If this is the last entry, then it went well enough for me. 左様なら。 Chizu out.

20241109

Yeah... It bugged me too much. The buggy dragging. I went and let the Realmers know about the map, and then thought to myself, "Are you really satisfied with it in this state?" And it was a nagging "No" that came back. Learned that there's a CSS property called [user-select] that can take the value "none" (among four possible values); this cleared up the problem with unintentionally dragging and selecting the maps tiles. This, however, was a bonus that I happened upon while working on dragging. Also looked over the other mouse events, and there's one called [onmouseover]. This was something. I mean, I actually got the thing dragging visually. It was great. It was... still flaky. I'm missing something. Either it's hidden (or something that I don't know about) or I wrote something silly (the more likely of the two). I found another interesting mouse event [onmouseleave] -- with this, no more of that weird over-dragging. So, 2.5/3 of three, tonight. Not terrible. I'll play with this again, later.

20241110

I fixed the dragging! :D Haha. Hopefully. :P I have no idea why it took so long for me to figure out. Just personal lack, somewhere. Got another bug to work out, though, and that's that the info box pops up with whatever cell was clicked on while dragging. Yay. More fun.

... I'm not sure how to fix this. The old, broken drag, didn't (usually) register an [onclick] event since the mouse left the cell that it started the click on. With the new functionality, the mouse stays in the cell; so all of the events fire for both the dragging and info box functions. I have no idea how to separate them as it stands. When the mouse is clicked, is one event certain to go first? Is it a race? If it's a race, I'll probably have to start all over again. ... Maybe I'll come back to this.