Having unwittingly raised the spirit of Galloc, the two
mages began a daily struggle to retain him in this earthy realm.
Just keeping his bodily form intact was difficult at first,
but with practice the spells became more familiar. Still, the
mages had to take turns sleeping and casting spells. After
two days at the hill top, Galloc had learned to walk a bit, and
the mages guided Galloc into the township, where they sought to find
direction from the populance.
Though the practicers of spells who were in the valley supported the
two mages' endeavors, the art of stabilizing a divine being was not
among the common magics, and in fact bordered on the occult.
Galloc's shifting apirance was becoming disturbing to the
peasants, as flesh would appear in spots only to grow old,
decay and be eaten by bugs mere minutes later. This made
Galloc less than an ideal dinner guest to say the least. The
occasional extra arm or tentical sprouting from Galloc's back
could be quite unsettling to those not accustomed to socercery.
The mages feared that Galloc would be shunned forever if they
did not find a way to at least give him consistant facial features.
Remembering a legend, they set out through the forest towards
the temple of Cheng, where it was said was kept the Book of Doc,
an ancient and blessed text of understanding. As they traveled
through the woods, they felt the eyes of magic beings upon them.
Many more than would normally venture this close to the path.
Wherever they went, they heard footsteps in the trees and brush.
Fearing for their lives, they hastened their way and left the
forest. Later they would realize that these were the Sprites,
one of Galloc's many supernatural familiars, who listed towards
Galloc, drawn by some celestial link.
After several more days of travel, they reached the temple of
Cheng, an empty building in the middle of nowhere, which had
no guards save for a large jewel encrusted gnu and a fiesty
incoherent camel. A sign above the temple read "freinds of freedom
are welcome here." Therein they found the Book of Doc, and indeed
after a small amount of time learning the spells inside, they were
able to conjur a mask of opacity, which is used by high sorcerers
give senses and countinance to beings without flesh. At last, with
the aid of this device, and a big black cloak they bought at the
factory outlet store, Galloc could now walk among the normals without
drawing negative attention. It also helped that he had stopped making
so many rude noises.
LibGalloc second ALPHA release.
http://mojo.calyx.net/~bri/projects/GGI/libgalloc.tar.bz2
What's in this release:
1) Docs, lots of them, and you can even read them in HTML at:
http://mojo.calyx.net/~bri/projects/GGI/galloc/
2) An API we felt was stable enough to write docs for. Really.
We're not going to have to change it anymore. Honest. :-)
3) Christoph is using the X target to demonstrate what a full blown
target will look like -- some of it even works, too! The X target
is being used to probe the full extent that a target can go to,
so there may be a few things in there that will be moved to helper
libraries later.
This isn't a BETA release, there are bugs, and you shouldn't
expect to actually use this code for anything quite yet. The BETA
release will contain hints on how to use LibGalloc in an extension;
that's when the rubber hits the road.
Help needed:
1) Christoph has lots of questions for anyone who knows anything and
everything about X programming.
2) If there are SGML nuts out there who can go through the docs
and mark up the terms/filenames/etc. and do cross links to external
GGI docs where appropriate, that would be super peachy.
3) Whoever is in charge or can volunteer to help fix CVS, DNS,
sourceforge, etc. we will probably be wanting to commit this soon,
and needing CVS at least working and a checklist of what should
be filled out at SourceForge.
4) How's KGI doing these days? Anyone got it on their TODO list
to write the new LibGGI target? If that's you, we definitely want
you to check Galloc out and offer at least your comments, if not code.
--
Brian
