Ramus was a proof-of-concept system for authoring (and reading) hypertext fiction, developed between 2011 and 2012. It was first described in an article called Hypertext: it doesn’t get much easier, on . It was followed by a series of much shorter updates:

Ramus update

We interrupt our regular program to let you know that Ramus has been updated. The new version has two changes:

The latter may still need some fine-tuning, but I cleaned up the most egregious idiocies in the code, and in any event it’s better than without the effect. Enjoy!

Comments

It’s great to know you’re still working on Ramus.

For my part, I’ve updated textallion with your latest version of Ramus.

I’ve also added support to convert the original lightweight markup to Inform7 source code (it’s only on the dev repository at the moment). You can test it there:

http://ifiction.free.fr/parchment/parchment.html?story=http://ifiction.free.fr/jeux/the_blue_death.z5

The Ramus export to compare: http://anamnese.online.fr/site2/textallion/showcase/the_blue_death/the_blue_death_ramus.html

(still not updated to the latest Ramus code)

Eric


Good work! I love the colors. And the smooth scroll looks much better when it has a longer distance to travel.

Felix


Ramus looks promising indeed!

I made a tiny cyoa game with php and would like to port it to Ramus (see my website link for the php version of the game).

However, in order to do so, I need a way to generate random numbers. For example from 1 to 4, 1 to 6, 1 to 12 and so on. I suppose this is not possible with the current version of Ramus?

If that is the case, could you please consider making a random numbers template for the next update?

Cheers!

— Marko


You can use arbitrary Javascript in Ramus, via the [?do … ?] template. That includes the Math.random() function. 🙂

Felix


Oh, I see. Thanks!

There is one more thing, the inventory. The inventory itself is just a fragment with [?if’s to show some text, based on the item flags set.

I’d like to show the inventory after every fragment.

I guess I could put the inventory script into every fragment but perhaps there is a more efficient way to do it?

— Marko


Well, if you want Undum-style inventory you’ll have to create an element to hold it, and position it somewhere to the side with CSS. Then you can render a template into it the same way it’s done in window.onload(). You can even alter setup_links() to do it at every turn.

Felix


Finished the port from php to Ramus! Given the Ramus interface, I started to have second thoughts about the inventory and dropped it.

The game can be found here:

http://www.roguelantern.com/ramus/quest.html

Good luck killing the beast!

— Marko


Well… I tried to make Ramus generic… and simple. That means it may not be the best solution for you. Glad to see it does what you want, though.

Now, if only I had any clue as to how to beat the beast… 😉

Felix

Minor Ramus update

Remember Ramus? I can’t blame you if you don’t — the last update was half a year ago. But recently, a new user (hi, John!) pointed out some missing stuff in Ramus, such as an example of how to link to multiple fragments at once, or include a fragment inside another. (The latter doesn’t work, by the way. See the F.A.Q.)

I also want to write some documentation, including a getting started guide, but that will require setting up a proper website for Ramus first, instead of a simple homepage. I’ll get around to it, just not right away. Thanks for your patience.

New Ramus website

As promised last time, I got around to setting up a new website for Ramus. Right now, it contains the exact same information as the original web page, except this time it has room to grow. And because it’s a wiki, you can suggest additions directly inline! See you there, and thanks. (Edit: for a while, Ramus had its own subdomain at ramus.notimetoplay.org, which at first ran on PmWiki.)

Ramus in the real world

No, don’t get too excited. This is something I did myself, and it’s not even an original work but a port of Juhana Leinonen‘s Starborn. I meant to do it when the game first came out, but there was too much going on behind the scenes, or so it seemed from looking at the source code, and I hesitated. In the mean time, Nitku ported it to Undum himself, thus proving that in a keyword-based game a few boolean flags may well be able to replace a full-blown world model. So I took a closer look, and it turned out that more than half of the original Inform 7 code was dedicated to disabling the parser, implementing keywords as a game concept and other such changes.

On the Ramus side, development turned out to be very easy indeed. The only real problem is that I keep typing href instead of rel — understandable after over a decade of Web development. It may be worth implementing URL autodetection, like in HTML TADS, but my laziness is stronger than the annoyance factor.

Anyway, you can download the game here. Enjoy!

Original Ramus story and more

This announcement is one week late (pesky real life…) but just after I published my port of Starborn — and Nitku graciously promoted it — a new user of Ramus surfaced and promptly did some very nice things with it.

Meet Conrad Cook. Not only he posted a minimal, “starter” Ramus document, a useful thing I failed to do myself, but followed up immediately with an original work called Unicorn Story. Which I am now hosting on the Ramus website at his request. Thank you, Conrad.

I also took the opportunity to flesh out the aforementioned website a little more, including an answer to the frequently asked question about (not using) jQuery. Hope this helps.

New Ramus story out there

Hello, everyone! I know it’s been quiet as of late, but we’re still around. There is an announcement coming soon, but in the mean time let’s welcome You I Give the Helm, a new multiple choice adventure by Roger Kenyon, which enhances Ramus with neat typography. It’s fairly replayable for its short length, too, so give it a go. Thank you, Roger!


(After this last update, Ramus was dormant for fully 7 years. Oh well.)