Wiki Messenger is a messenger app (and server) where the messages can be generated procedurally. It's intended for rapid prototyping and casual, collaborative interactive fiction development.
The app runs in a mobile browser with a swipe-based interface for accepting/rejecting procedurally-generated text.
You will need to rename the file config/local_example.js to "config/local.js". If you want to set up Twitter and/or Facebook API keys, this is the place to put them.
You will also need MySQL (for the database) and Redis (for the session store) running on localhost.
In MySQL you will need to create a database called 'wikimess'. Currently the MySQL username is set to 'root' and the password is the empty string. This can be changed in config/datastores.js.
Then e.g. (on Mac)
brew install node
npm install -g sails
npm install
sails lift &
bin/load-data.jsThen point your browser to localhost:1337.
The final two steps of this initialization sequence (sails lift and bin/load-data.js) can be combined by specifying -l to the load-data.js script
bin/load-data.js -lThe script has lots more options; it crawls the data directory to pre-load corpora into the thesaurus (i.e. the database of symbol expansions constituting the context-free grammar).
You can log in using Twitter authentication (via passport.js).
However, currently this redirects back to wikimess.me, so it will not work on your local machine.
Edit the Twitter client ID & secret in config/local_example.js (and rename to config/local.js) to use a different Twitter account and app credentials.
(Facebook authentication is also implemented, but is currently disabled by default in the client via the configuration setting showFacebookLoginButton: false.)
To enable/disable direct inspection of the data model via Sails blueprint methods, edit the REST policy in config/policies.js. Currently, it allows local users full access to the database.
Bracery is Wiki Messenger's native syntax for representing generative context-free grammars. Bracery blends elements of Tracery and regular expression syntax.
Wiki Messenger implements Bracery expansion as a web service, with nonterminal definitions as a RESTful resource. On startup, an initial set of symbols is loaded from the data/symbols directory.
Special Bracery variables interpreted by Wiki Messenger include
$icon and $icolor (name and color of icons displayed on cards)$caption (optional caption text underneath the icon)$tags (set by default to the message tags; if modified, will override the message tags)$prevtags (tags for the previous message)$reject, if defined, forces a card to be posted (with &$reject appended) even if the player rejects it$accept, if defined, will cause &$accept to be appended to accepted cards before posting$status, if defined, will cause &$status to be displayed on help cards$meters contains a list of tuples of the form (icon,level,status) which can be used to add meter icons to the navbar along with status text on help cardsBracery provides some functions to manipulate these variables (&tag, &accept, &reject, &status, &meter).
Symbol definitions can be provided in JSON or in the plaintext shorthand defined by Bracery. Several symbol definitions are provided in the Wiki Messenger repository, along with scripts to import symbol definitions from resources such as Darius Kazemi's corpora.
Wiki Messenger templates are Braceplates (Bracery message templates). On startup, the initial set of templates is loaded from the data/templates directory. Further templates can be created from the messenger app by simply composing and sending messages.
Template definitions can be provided in JSON or in the plaintext shorthand defined by Bracery.
You can test templates outside of Wiki Messenger using bracery's -m option
(short for --markov, because it basically samples a trajectory through a Markov chain).
Make sure to also load any required symbol definitions.
For example:
bracery data/symbols/*.txt data/symbols/*.json -m data/templates/dnd.txtOr for an interactive command-line experience that's a little closer to the Wiki Messenger web client UI
(in that it allows you to keep re-rolling the next move until you're happy with it),
use bracery with the -q option (short for --quiz) instead of -m:
bracery data/symbols/*.txt data/symbols/*.json -q data/templates/dnd.txtYou can also use Bracery's templates2dot.js script to get a visualization of the Markov chain as a GraphViz dot file
(the -o option will create and open the PDF automatically, but only on a Mac with GraphViz installed)
./node_modules/bracery/bin/templates2dot.js -o data/templates/dnd.txtSymbol definitions are in data/symbols.
Files in the data/symbols directory use Bracery's plaintext format for symbol definitions.
The data/symbols directory contains several pre-loaded sets of synonyms including selections from Darius Kazemi's corpora, Moby, and Wordnet.
The Makefile in this directory fetches and builds these synonym sets.