What's that, Furcadia?

I sat down with Lothus Marque, today. (Literally. He sat on the edge of his bed!)

The direct and strict purpose of the conversation was to get an interview for What’s That, Furcadia?, so you all would have something to read.

We’d originally sat down to talk about his latest project, (The Furcadia Portrait Previewer) The best laid plans, however, don’t always go to plan.

The first thing to come to mind out of Lothus’s many projects was one of the first that became widely used: Patch Fusion.

Patch Fusion is a tool used for combining two or more patches together in any given sequence so that a Dream weaver doesn’t have to do them all by hand. The tool was originally designed when Lothus’s friends were having problems with the original Patch Merger. (By Graphite.)
That, combined with the fact that it was nearly impossible to find. Lothus found it in an esoteric Yahoo News Group, originally, and handed it around to his friends before making his own.
Of course, it helped that he was bored and looking for a project to do at the time.

For a moment, here, I thought about forging ahead into the information on The Furcadia Portrait Previewer, but I got sidetracked by the Draconic Magician.

For those of you unaware, the Draconic Magician is a simple tool that uses pre-made scripts to provide DS lines of a complex nature for dreams, without having to work out the DS themselves. It allows for simple integration, and that’s why it has become popular.
This, like others, was made because Lothus was looking for a project to work on in his spare time. The catalyst for this project was the rash of recent bits of similar software showing up. They had interfaces that made them hard for him to use, and he didn’t like the fact that they were over a megabyte, (sometimes 3 or 4 megabytes) and they didn’t offer any kind of customization. The customization, more than anything, spurned him forward. The DS wizard can be updated and modified to work, even if Lothus himself decides to later abandon the project.

Lothus actually was the person who helped me get used to Furnarchy back when I started Furcadia, (four years ago,) and has been an active part of the Furnarchy creation process, (in the form of Modules, insofar as Furnarchy 3 was concerned, and scripts, insofar as Furnarchy 2 is concerned.)
This was yet another example of Lothus wanting to give back to the community somewhat. He also says he was suckered in by the idea of adding on to existing software as a user and not a straight out developer.
The fact that he wanted a few features that other developers didn’t provide was just an additional spur to drive him onward.

We were swimming deep in memories at this point, which is when the FurController. This handy little device, (brought about due to boredom and the urge to have a dancing troupe of Borg bother a friend,) allows you to control multiple different characters at a time. That’s pretty much all there was to it, and the dance troupe has since left to other realms hereafter unknown.

All this talk about the past got us involved in some simple talk about what all we’d been doing on Furcadia, and why we’d stuck around.
Many of you may not know, but Lothus and I are both Beekins. (I’m a Mason, he’s a Helper and a Teacher.) We’ve both been active in the helper program for over a year. (Him, just a tad longer than me.)
He joined up because he was wanting the tools and resources provided by the Help program to help a wider variety of people than the occasional question/answer that he popped off with when asked by friends. His motivation, however, was purely selfish. He likes the feeling of knowing he helped someone. How crazy is that?

The DS Decompiler, (ooh, we had begun dancing back toward the Furcadia Portrait Previewer!) was made on the fly one afternoon after he’d done something kinda stupid.
He’d accidentally deleted his dream, and didn’t have any other copies of it (at that stage, at least,) saved elsewhere.
After looking around for a while, (and not really finding an up-to-date program,) Lothus made one of his own. It takes the DS file sent to the folder, (only those that are unencrypted,) and turns them back in to DS lines so that they’re easy to read and ready to use.
He warns everyone that they should only do so with permission, though. It’s rude to steal someone elses hard work, just because they didn’t encrypt their dreams.

We got to talking about what was next on his list of projects, and he said that he’s going to update Beeker soon, and the scripts-controlling module that he said he would do on the Heroin Puppy forums. Also, his bot, M.E.R.C. is still in need of completion.
The Bot is going to be another example of Lothus’s ideology that extension post-creation should be left up to the users, insomuch as possible.

Finally, we talked about The Furcadia Portrait Previewer. It was a project that was dropped into his lap by a portrait artist who wanted to let people try her ports out in their colors before they bought it. The hardest part, or so he claimed, was getting the color tables for the pallet swapping.
He finally managed to get it done for her, and has been polishing it regularly since then. He’s going to, soon, offer it up for sale to Portrait Artists who want to use it on their websites.
It’s going to go for $25USD, which includes a complete install and integration into the current website design. If you’re not interested in that, you can buy the package itself for $15USD.

To check out Lothus’s website, click here.
If you’d like to check out the portrait re-mapper, you can look here.