Trinary

I’ve been using this application for a while now…

Trinary was actually made well before CL Informer, and was the inspiration for making that mobile app. CL Informer then evolved on its own, in particular regarding its appearance. So recently I brought back to Trinary various improvements I had made for Informer (both in code and in presentation) and also the color palette and the visual appearance of Informer.

The CL Status window (shown above) is mostly used to monitor what is going on in Clan Lord (CL) while I am not playing. CL is an online role-playing game with a persistent world. People “log on” at various times, either for planned events or just to see what’s happening. There is a “status” web site with an XML feed that Trinary queries to see who is online and what the latest news are. It can alert me when friends log on, for example, so that I may decide to join them in the game.

By the way, I am aware that it is “information intensive” and I know many people don’t like that, but I personally like it that way (or else why would I have made it like that?). I guess I’m used to take in information-dense visuals.

It can also show me what time it is in CL, when the next sunrise and sunset are (these affect gameplay), what is the current phase of the moon and when the next full moon is (there is a special even that happens only at the full moon), what is the tides level currently and what it will be over the next few hours (some locations are tied to the tides).

I also have various “utilities” for the game. One is a special map, called a skristal map, which basically gives information on the position of the various “snells” (think of it as a unit piece of map) in regards to one another. This is useful for my character, which is a mystic, as he can “locate” other exiles (characters in the game) to know where they are (useful when they are in trouble and cannot communicate their location). The tool used for that is called a skristal (hence the name of the map) and it gives a location as a distance in snells and a direction, so a skristal map can help determine which snell a fallen (a character in trouble) exile is in.

The image above shows the Outpost, a location in the Bison Plains, and the surrounding snells. The presentation needs a lot of work but it’s a utility and I’m still entering snell information. I have a bit more than 500 snells done at the moment. You can move around with the arrows, enter coordinates, change the zoom level (1, 9, or 25 snells), you can change the elevation (some snells are on top of each other at the same location). It also shows useful information on the snell, which NPC is located there for example.

I also have a tool for determining when the various zodiacs will “rise with the sun.” The rising zodiac affects some puzzles in the game (or other things), and it’s useful to know what is the currently rising zodiac (which is shown in the CL Status window), but it’s sometimes useful to know when a particular zodiac will start rising with the sun in the futur. The Rising Zodiacs utility does that.

I also have a Date Utility for translating “In Real Life” (IRL) dates to CL dates.

And a Cloud Utility, which by the way gave the application its name. In the game world there is an island floating on a cloud that move across the main island of the game (called Puddleby Island). You can reach this floating “Cloud Island” (we just call it the “Cloud”) by walking through a magical mirror (which is at a fixed location in South Forest)¹.

On the Cloud there is a room where the Ancients, who build the whole thing, had a “control room.” In this room you can see the current location of the Cloud (in relation to Puddleby Island) in their own script (shown above), which is a triangular script and which I, personally, call Trinary (hence the name of the app)².

I have a terrible memory, but I also have been playing this game for 25 years, and over that time period I have stopped playing for various stretches of time, players have come and gone, and returned. Players have multiple characters (which we call “alts”), and there are role-playing information to remember (which of my characters has done what with whom for example). So I write stuff down! And I used to do it in a notepad 25 years ago. I have later put that in a macro³ database. I’ve since then moved to a database in Trinary, and I have a utility to enter that information (that information can also be shown in the CL Status window). Not very pretty and it could be more functional, but it does the job for now. For obvious reasons I am only showing the inforation on a bot character in the picture below.

And, speaking of macros, the last utility that I have is a window showing some of the macros used by Drablak (my main character). These are not all of them, and I need to update this (since I have changed computer since I last played CL and the keyboard has changed).

I have one of these for each type of character I play (mystic, healer, fighter, etc.). And that’s about it for Trinary, it’s a potpourri of tools to help with various aspects of playing Clan Lord.