Sunday, April 24, 2005

Cleaning The Blog's Appearance

Obviously the template for this blog has been horribly broken hopefully that's now somewhat resolved. I would happily write my own, but I like to use lots of tools and I could imagine it would be a chore on my portable. So I've grabbed another pre-made template and attempted to maximize the screen real-estate of my main posts. (as my big images tend to kill frames, or divisions.

The basic grammar parser is pretty much finished. I've been having some thoughts about terminals and non-terminals. Terminals could be functions so I could have something like:


[wall] -> "StartDrawingWall()" [walltiles] "FinishDrawingWall()"
[walltiles] -> "DrawATile" "MoveToNewSelectedTile" [walltiles]
[walltiles] -> "DrawATile"


The only worry with this, is that I'm overcomplicating things. But this way I could have the computer know which tiles make up a wall and therefore base other decisions off it. The real thing I want to do is have a grammar that given some area of tiled space - will create a building in it. I'm pretty sure it's not hard just to make a box building but I'd like the buildings each to have idiosyncrasies (acloves, ruins rooms, enterance ways, patios etc (this wouldn't be hard to put into the grammar)). Saying that I don't want the grammar reliant on too much of my C# code.

The one possible avenue of attack for this is to have the alpha part (first part of the rule) of the production describe areas larger than one tile.

[grasstile] [grasstile] [grasstile] [grasstile] [wall_tile] [grasstile]
[grasstile] [grasstile] [grasstile] -> [grasstile] [wall_tile] [grasstile]
[grasstile] [grasstile] [grasstile] [grasstile] [wall_tile] [grasstile]


This would really benefit from a more graphical interface. It's also even now for me hard to predict what would happen. I think an endless loop? Of course you'd have a cut off point. The other thing that is important though is when building a room or a house - the computer must know it's a room or a house. That way the grammar can add chairs and people and everything necessary.

Maybe I should just start simple for now it's not an easy problem. The wonderful thing about grammars is that it's very easy to add diversity by only adding a few more rules.

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