Re: [game-lang] a survey of previous work

[Marc Lanctot <lanctot@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 07/26/2010 01:30 PM, Joel Uckelman wrote:
> Thus spake Simon McGregor:
> > I'd like to make another proposal.
> >
> > Let's see if we can all agree that our language ought to have access
> > (either as primitives or more likely as a standard library) to
> > game-level concepts like board spaces, movable pieces, decks of cards,
> > and so on. If so, we probably want slightly abstracted versions of
> > these with an inheritance hierarchy (e.g. a deck of cards is a
> > specific example of a randomly permutable list: one in which the items
> > have two sides and various other properties), but these aren't crucial
> > details.
>
> This is what I was advocating from the start. Somehow I think we are
> not actually disagreeing.

I'm going back-and-forth, partly because I don't fully understand the 
points. I think I'm getting caught up in terminology.

Board game pieces, decks of cards, card states (face-up, face down), 
component colors and ownerships, adjacencies of "locations" on a board, 
the induced graph of the board, relationships between all these 
things... I don't normally think of these as "GUI elements". I'd call 
them "high-level game primitives", or something to that effect. I think 
Simon has referred to them as abstract game elements.

Pixels, dialog boxes, windows, mouse clicks, specific .png files to 
attribute to each physical piece, what language the user has chosen, 
etc. is what I usually consider to be "GUI elements".

Our goal (as I understand it):

1. To design a language that describes the logical rules of the game.

2. We want the language to contain high-level abstract board game 
components and concepts, specifically ones that are present in modern 
board games, that are reusable among games written in the language.

I think our goals are aligned, but maybe we're just getting confused due 
to terminology. I agree that our goals coincide with the points Simon 
listed in his last email.

I think this discussion will become more clear (at least to me) once we 
start designing the language and writing games in our language.

Marc

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