Richard Walter on Fri, 10 Aug 2012 10:14:35 -0700 (MST)


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Re: [game-lang] Late to the party


> ... does Jogre provide any kind of primitives of game logic or presentation?  Or is each individual game responsible for implementing the API in its own (hidden) way?

Jogre has a few (*very* few) primitives for game logic and presentation:  It has a card & deck class for logic; it has square, triangular & hexagonal boards for presentation.  But that's pretty much it.

Jogre is primarily about building the networking infrastructure for the client/server view.  So, it handles things like users logging in to the server, selection of games that the server supports, creating tables for players to join, having players sit at seats at the table, managing messages between clients & servers, etc...  The details of game logic, presentation of the game state, and the contents of the messages passed around are all unique to each game and they can implement those in any way that they want.

One of the things on my todo list (which is, admittedly, woefully long-out-of-date) was to generalize some of the components that I did for specific games and move them into a generic space.  Things like the component for drawing a hand of cards and letting the user select one for play.

> ... I started wondering if there was a useful niche for a game component description format, which could be compiled to GDL on the logic side and also provide hints to a UI.

I think that would be great.  I view logic & UI as two different aspects that need to be tied together.  There is no reason that two players couldn't view the same game state with wildly different graphical presentations.

-Richard


From: Dan Percival <dan.percival@xxxxxxxxx>
To: Richard Walter <rwalter42@xxxxxxxxx>; A list for developing a game representation language <game-lang@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, August 9, 2012 12:14 PM
Subject: Re: [game-lang] Late to the party

I am reading up on Jogre now. It looks like an exciting project. I haven't gotten far enough yet to know: does Jogre provide any kind of primitives of game logic or presentation? Or is each individual game responsible for implementing the API in its own (hidden) way?

In reading the archives of this list, I started wondering if there was a useful niche for a game component description format, which could be compiled to GDL on the logic side and also provide hints to a UI. I'm thinking of something like Cameron Browne's Ludi descriptions, which are less general than GDL but much more readable.

Or for a more object-oriented, less LISPy approach: in the GDL for chess, the board state is essentially an 8x8 array of strings, and moving a piece is performed by blanking the source element of the array and overwriting the destination element. Something that humans know about chess pieces, though, is that they can only be in one place at once, and abstract descriptions of Token and Location could impose that restriction and reduce the possibility for errors.

Dan

On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 9:52 AM, Richard Walter <rwalter42@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dan,

I'm late to the replys (was out on vacation for the last week), but am also still around.

I'm one of the admins for the Jogre open-source on-line game engine and was interested in this for the possibility of adding a module to Jogre to allow it to play games specified in a generic manner so that Java development knowledge wasn't required to write new games to allow for more widespread development by more users.

I'm not as academically oriented as some of the other people here :), so I'd expected to be more of a fly-on-the-wall to see how this developed.  Unfortunately, work & personal life got busy and so I haven't had much free time to devote to this, but am still interested.

-Richard


From: Dan Percival <dan.percival@xxxxxxxxx>
To: game-lang@xxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, August 2, 2012 11:48 AM
Subject: [game-lang] Late to the party

Hi, all.

I found this list from a Google search for "game description language nomic", which lead to a BGG forum thread (I'm dan_percival there), which lead me here. I've very recently caught the GDL(-II) bug, though in reading through the posts here I am fascinated by the various arguments for a replacement. One specific interest I have is in extending or replacing GDL to express metagames such as Nomic, Mao, or in a limited sense the CCG model.

I've spent a nice hour or so reading through the list archives, and some thoughts have come to mind. Before I wade in too deeply, though, I wanted to know if anyone is still interested in the topic, or even still subscribed!

Dan

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