THOMAS

The Hypermedia Online Multiplayer Adventure System

A client and engine for real-time text worlds — and the editors you build one with. Architect is the game that runs on it. It isn't the only one that could.

by David Lacey and John Akerson

Plugins at boot: 131
Engine modules: 111
Editor screens: 42
Tables: 150
Content files: 41,419
Build step: ~~none~~

Runtime · what a player sees

The client

Raw WebSockets, vanilla JavaScript, one HTML file per client and a sibling stylesheet. No framework, no bundler, no build step — what's in the repo is what the browser runs.

The room is prose, and everything around it's instrumentation: a minimap, vitals, a D-pad, the environment block (clock, in-world date, temperature, light, rest, dryness), who else is here, and a smartbar that offers only the verbs this room can actually take. Nouns in the description are live — the camera, the furniture, the exits are all clickable.

The Architect game client showing a room description, vitals, minimap, D-pad and smartbar — **Coldwater Clone Facility.** Vitals, minimap and D-pad on the rail; the smartbar along the bottom carries **Switch (2)**, **Examine (8)**, **Use (2)** — counts derived from what's in the room, not a fixed toolbar. The wanted-star meter is at the top; the tile is flagged **[SAFE]**.

The in-world tablet, Architect OS, showing a grid of sixteen apps — Sixteen apps on one screen — map, inventory, vitals, quests, chat, bank, crime record, skills, crafting, news, music, calendar, TV, codex, help and settings. Everything the surrounding interface has no room for. First-run guidance is part of the client, not a wiki.

One surface, three rungs

Every system with both a graphical presentation and a written one answers to a single player preference: visual, textgames, or log. At the bottom rung the panels stand down and the record reaches the log instead, so the whole game remains playable through a screen reader. That ladder is engine-level, not a per-feature afterthought.

/dev

The dev panel

Forty-two screens pointed at the running world. Not a CMS bolted on afterwards — the panel is how the world is made, and its own chrome reads POWERED BY THOMAS.

Sessions are role-gated (admin, dev, builder, designer), and two buttons cross the boundary into the game itself: Ghost Mode drops you into any zone unseen, and Play hands your session to the game client so you land in-world as your own character.

/dev → world map

Regions on a global grid

The world is regions placed on one grid. Create a new one by naming a size and a base terrain, drag it to reposition, double-click to fall into its tiles.

The World Map panel showing five regions placed on a global grid — Five regions, each drawn from its own terrain snapshot. **Coldwater** 93×52 · 4,837 tiles — **Deadwater** 93×52 · 4,836 — **The Scarletwastes** 93×52 · 4,836 — **Terminus** 40×40 · 1,600 — **The Reach** 20×20 · 400. Changes stage rather than publish.

/dev → region maps

The terrain painter

Inside a region, tiles are painted. Roads auto-tile into junctions from their neighbours; the brush writes flags.terrain, which is the single source of truth for ground surface everywhere downstream — minimap, tablet, pacing, footstep audio.

The Region Maps panel painting terrain on Coldwater, with the surface palette open — **Visual layout editor for connected zone maps.** The floating palette carries the full surface vocabulary — road, dirt road, asphalt, concrete, grass, park, forest, sand, gravel, dock, water, scrubland, red rock, hardpan, alkali flat, plateau, basalt, dead stand, sinter crust, hot spring, ramp, cliff face, scree slope. Above the canvas the panel is running a live geometry check: **no geometry errors**, but three one-way connections missing a return exit, each with a one-click fix.

Buildings, floors and z-levels are handled in the same view — z = 0 is the street, and the Interior tab holds the rooms behind the facades.

localhost:5180

The Studio — a map editor that edits files

A second, deliberately separate editor with no database in the process at all. It reads and writes the content tree and nothing else.

The Studio map editor showing all five regions and a tile inspector — All five regions drawn at once — 16,712 tiles. Every fill and glyph comes from the same derive pass the content import runs, so the preview can't show a colour the build wouldn't produce. The status bar lints continuously (**lint clean · 2 warnings**), and the right pane lists the 136 exits that lead off this map. Thirty-one themes ship with it.

Why two map editors

The dev panel edits the live database; the Studio edits files. They're two processes because the Studio parses the whole content tree to lint, which inside the game server would stall the tick loop. The panel says so itself, in the banner above its own canvas: don't run both on the same tiles in one sitting.

/dev → vine suite

VINE

The graph layer. Four families of node graph, one canvas, one editor — and a hub that reaches every graph in the game.

VineQuestObjective DAGs & rewards

VineDialogueNPC conversation trees

VineAINPC & enemy behaviour

VineScriptsScripted events

The VINE Suite hub with four graph families and an index of every graph — **Every VINE graph in the game — dialogue, behaviour, scripts, broadcasts, quests — reachable from one hub.** The index is sorted by weight, so the biggest graphs surface first, and it counts its own coverage: **197 of 250 NPCs have a dialogue graph**. Each row carries the record id and its node count.

VINE → dialogue

Conversation as a graph

A dialogue node holds the line the character speaks and every reply the player can give. Replies are ports; wires are where they go.

An 83-node dialogue graph open in the VINE editor — The largest conversation in the game. The root node carries fourteen openings; each has its own outbound port on the node's lower half, and the wires fan out from there. Node ids (**root**, **work**, **the_flask**, **the_flask_sacred**, **the_flask_diseased**, **earned**) are the author's own naming, and the prose is the shipped prose — this is the editing surface, not a preview of one.

The tab strip at the top left switches the same record between families without leaving the canvas: an NPC's dialogue and that NPC's behaviour tree are two graphs on one row, and AI Behaviour › in the toolbar crosses straight over. Play view walks the tree as a player would read it.

VINE → ai

Behaviour trees

The same canvas, a different schema. Six node types — Start, Condition, Action, Wait, Loop, Random Branch — and the palette in the toolbar is generated from the schema rather than hand-written per family.

A behaviour tree in the VINE editor with condition and action nodes — Conditions branch on **Has Target**, **HP Below %**, **Random Chance** and **Flag Is Set**, each with true and false ports. Colour is typed, not decorative: green for entry, orange for conditions, blue for actions.

The same behaviour tree after auto-layout, showing loop edges — The same tree after **Auto-layout**, which arranges left-to-right and minimises crossings. The long returning wires are the loop edges — a behaviour tree is a cycle, and the layout doesn't pretend otherwise. The largest behaviour graph in the world is 98 nodes.

VINE → scripts, quests

Scripted events and objectives

VineScripts

Scripts

VINE behaviour graphs for scripted events, branching dialogue, and quest logic.

Quests

Quests

Multi-step player objectives with triggers, conditions, and rewards.

Scripts · registry

Script registry

Every script graph in the world, with its trigger and node count.

/dev → content

Content editors

Sixty-five content types, 41,419 files. Every one of these screens is a form over a table, and every table exports to one JSON file per entity — so the world is diffable, reviewable and deployed by a push.

Zones

Zones

Edit room descriptions, exits, danger ratings, and zone properties.

Items

Items

Create and edit weapons, armour, consumables, and world objects.

NPCs

NPCs

Configure named characters — dialogue, faction, schedules, and AI.

Enemies

Enemies

Define enemy stats, behaviour trees, attack patterns, and loot tables.

Furniture

Furniture

Interactive objects placed in zones — terminals, vendors, seats, and more.

Tag Catalog

Recipes

Crafting recipes linking ingredient items to output items, with skill and station requirements.

Drugs

Drugs

Consumable substances with timed stat effects, addiction, and overdose thresholds.

Mutations

Mutations

Radiation-triggered biological modifications that alter player stats and abilities.

Dream Rooms

Unreality

Rooms for the experiences a player can be put inside — a sleep dream, or a dissociative hallucination. Not zones: no coordinates, no place on any map.

Scavenging

Scavenging tables

Reusable loot templates for the scavenge action, attached to a zone from the zone editor.

Trading Cards

Cards

Every struck card — players who minted themselves, plus NPC and enemy cards cut from world content. Character counters enforce the text budgets, because a card must never truncate.

Aliases

Aliases

Verb shortcuts, rewritten to the canonical verb before the command runs — invisible to players. Engine defaults can be overridden and restored.

Zone Validator

Validator

Cross-references zones and content for broken exits, missing references, and bad data.

/dev → audio, soundscript, broadcasts

Sound and television

Audio is authored, not shipped as files. Instruments are synth definitions; the client builds the sound.

The Audio panel listing synth instruments by waveform — **Music instruments, songs, SFX clips, ambient tracks, and audio event bindings.** 171 instruments, 17 songs, 26 sound effects, 12 ambient beds, 195 samples and 5 event routes. Each instrument names a waveform — square, triangle, sine, sawtooth, noise — and every row auditions in place. Songs group into named kits (**psychotech**, 42 instruments).

SoundScript

SoundScript

Named audio-text sound effects and ambient text events, broadcast by zone theme.

Broadcasts

Broadcasts

TV channels, schedules, NPC hosts, themes, and live broadcast content.

Gossip Pool

Gossip

Live in-memory gossip, strongest first. Spread a rumour as any NPC; the pool clears on restart.

/dev → server

The world while it's running

These screens aren't editors. They're instruments on a simulation that keeps moving whether or not anyone is looking at it.

The Unrest ledger showing grip, heat and pressure per city block — **The faction-conflict ledger** — grip, heat and pressure per derived city block, the band each sits in, the authored role roster, and every live incident. None of it reaches the player: there's no verb, no gauge and no number in the game client, because the moment there's one the simulation becomes a dashboard to optimise. The dev panel is the deliberate opposite and gets every scalar.

Time & Weather

Time & weather

Day/night cycle settings, climate profiles, and weather forecasting.

Power Grid

Power

City power infrastructure and per-zone power dependencies.

Crime

Crime

Live crime log, the fine and jail multiplier, per-crime enforcement toggles, the Emergency Security Protocol and the Arbiter subsystem.

Flight

Flight

Charter-pilot work status, the flight request log, and every aircraft instance — conjures, player purchases, wrecks.

Bank & ATMs

Bank

ATM networks, faction banking, credit limits, and fee configuration.

World State

World state

Live flags and variables governing the world.

Games

Games

Live poker and chess tables — who is seated, what's in the pot.

Players

Players

Connected and registered accounts, character stats, and session data.

The game client at street level in poor light — The same simulation from the other side of the wire: Ironside Street, where **the light is poor and details are hard to make out** — that line is the lighting model talking, not set dressing.

Pipeline

The rails underneath

Two rules do most of the load-bearing. Engine and content are separate — the codebase is the engine, the world lives in Postgres and under a content tree. And nothing migrates on boot: schema and content both change deliberately.

Gate	What it refuses to let through
regress	Boots the world and all plugins with no server, sweeps every plugin manifest against the live registries, then drives real commands end to end.
content:lint	A hand-authored content file carrying a runtime column.
docs:lint	A dead doc link, a plugin verb missing from the index, or a status header that contradicts its own body.
client:smoke	Any of the 253 client files failing to parse — there's no build step, so nothing else would catch it.
shapes:smoke	A building model that throws when a player flies past it.
query-lint	A database round trip added to a hot path.

devlog panel in the dev panel — **Team heads-ups and recent code activity** — server restarts, migrations and content scripts posted where the next person checking in will see them, alongside a commit feed by author. The dashboard counts what has landed since you last looked: **148 commits, 6 of them core-engine changes, in the last 14 days**.

Where the name comes from

THOMAS appears exactly once in the running product — the dev panel's boot splash, which reads as if it were naming the dev panel. It's not. It names the platform the splash is booting: the client, the engine, the plugin loader, the editors on this page and the deploy pipeline behind them. Coldwater, the Basin and everything written in them are Architect, and they're the part a second game would replace.