REVIVING 1990S DIGITAL DRESS-UP DOLLS WITH SMOOCH
Libby Horacek
POSITION DEVELOPMENT
@horrorcheck
Strange Loop (Sep 22-Sep 24, 2022 - St. Louis) is a conference for software developers covering programming langs, databases, distributed sy
What is the Kisekae Set System: It is a system to make digital dress up dolls!
Created in 1991 by MIO.H for use in a Japanese BBS. Pre-web!!! By separating the system from the assets of the dolls, you can make the systems much smaller
CEL image format. They have a transparent background and indexed colors like GIFs!
There is also the KCF Palette Format. Each GUF stores its own palette, with CELs there is a shared KCF palette file. Which is a file size cost savings. You do not have to repeat your color info per file.
Having your palette in another file makes palette swapping really easy! Just swap the KCF file!
CNF configuration files dictate layering, grouping, setting, and positions!
KiSS dolls have a lot of files, so they used LhA, the most popular compression format in Japan at the time.
In 1994, KLS (a user) created the KiSS General Specification
1995 FKiSS is born by Dov Sherman and Yav, which adds sounds, and animation!
FKiSS 2, 3, 4, two versions of FKiSS 5! So much innovation!
1995-2005 huge growth in KiSS! Increase of access, mainstreaming of anime, younger and more female audience.
2007-2012: KiSS declined due to it being much harder to make. All the old tutorials were written for older systems, English-speaking KiSS-making died out by 2010
The Sims, and other doll making was more accessible.
But, why KiSS? If I can make dolls in other places. They are great snapshots of the pre-internet world, and how play online evolved early on.
Lots of fun dolls were available, and it would be cool to save it.
Picrew is a modern thing people use to make dolls.
Tagi Academy is a tamagochi game within KiSS. Impressive!
KiSS has an open specification!!!! That is super cool! That means anyone can make your own viewer, as opposed to a closed system in The Sims.
So, why NOT make a KiSS interpreter?!!
Libby made Smooch, a KiSS renderer written in Haskell, which at the Recurse Center!
Smooch used a web framework called Fn (fnhaskell.com)
Had to make a CNF file parser using Parsec library that uses parsing combinators.
She created a data type that houses everything that can be in a CNF file, and parses it correctly in priority order.
Parsing is a great candidate for test-driven development. You can write a test with a bad CNF file, and then make sure your parser handles it.
The parser translates CNF lines into JSON. Uses the ASON library to translate into JSON.
First tried cel2pnm, coded with help from Mark Dominus at Recurse Center Made a C program that converted cels to portable bitmaps, which could be translated into PNGs.
Then JuicyPixels was created to translate palette files directly in Haskell
Now it is converted to JavaScript! No libraries, just JS!
Using PNGs in JS, thought, made it hard to click on parts of the clothing! Since it is squares.
So, you use ghost canvases! You use tow canvases, one on top of the other, to find the color of the pixel you clicked on, If you clicked on a scarf color, it will pick the scarf, and if you pick the sweater, you get the sweater!
Libby just added FKiSS 1 to Smooch! So we have animations now! The animations are basically event-based scripting the CEL files.
Smooch translates FKiSS to JSON, then the interpreter translates the JSON to JavaScript!
An action in FKiSS is translated into a function in JS. To do this you have to use bind in JS.
The events become CustomEvents in JS! So it looks like a regular event on the DOM.
What is the future of KiSS? Let's get more people making KiSS dolls!!! So why not make it easy to make dolls using PNGs.
How can we make people interested in building KiSS dolls and KiSS tooling.
Smooch need contributors!
Kisekae Set System implementation for the web. Contribute to emhoracek/smooch development by creating an account on GitHub.
Thank you, Libby, for the great talk!
