Been forever since I posted here, so I doubt anyone will notice. But I'm moving off LJ as well: too many invasive ads, too many alternatives. Find me on http://lertulo.blogspot.com from now on.

Okay, I'm now officially betting on myself finishing this one. I've invested a whopping $50 registering a domain name for my new game; you can drop by and see a screenshot of the Windows client's menu, since that's about the only thing that's working so far. But it's a start--and now if I don't finish, I'm out the $50 for no reason.

www. ( Read more... )

Six weeks ago I said I wouldn't post again until I'd finished off the scripting engine. Did that: it's wrapped up, streaming and all. A fun sub-project complete with a compact command-line tool for running scripts and a nice robust runtime interface for linking the interpreter into other applications ( Read more... )

Things are going well on the scripting front: the parser has been enriched to handle array definitions properly, the compiler and generate about a dozen different bytecodes, and the interpreter is actually implemented fully enough to run scripts using those codes ( Read more... )

Been doing too much posting and not enough coding. I'm off to make some more progress on the compiler, which means I need to lay out the bytecode design, which in turn means I needed to summarize how the interpreter was going to run. So here are the notes on the interpreter; back when it's starting to work.

( Interpreter Notes )

If you look over the formal grammar, you'll see that it's defined as a hierarchy. For example, type A is defined as type B followed by a semicolon or an optional series of type C followed by a type D:

type_a ::= type_b ";" | [type_c]* type_d

A simplistic parser that recognizes such a definition would look roughly like this:

bool ( Read more... )

Once you've nailed down the grammar--and yes, I made several changes since my last post--it's time to start the compiler itself. The compiler takes two stages: parsing and generation ( Read more... )

Having designed the scripting-language-to-be, and having already broken an inbound script into tokens, the next step is to compile the thing. To do that, we'll need a formal grammar for the language: something more precise than the human-readable examples whipped up so far ( Read more... )

A short article for an easy step. The first part of compiling or interpreting a script is breaking the script's text up into tokens. If you're using lex (which you probably should do), that's pretty easy--but since "easy" is no fun, I'll be doing it the old-fashioned hand-coded way ( Read more... )

Is this Game Programming 101 or not? Haven't done anything but whine about cell phones and talk about TKD for a year now. Time to get on with the programming!

"In the beginning, the Matrix was designed as a utopia for humans, but some say we lack the programming code to create a perfect world." -Agent Smith, Matrix
 Yes, it's time to design ( Read more... )