Re: [DM-dev] dungeonmaker as a web application :)

[Stephan B. <st...@wa...>]

On Sunday 19 August 2001 14:12, you wrote:
> >I've was toying around with some ideas and I think I've decided to make
> >a web-runnable version of dungeonmaker.
>
> Would this be for pen-and-paper players to print out? Or just to show the
> DungeonMaker to people without the need to download code?

Could be both. If they can see the dungeons they can print them out. I don't 
know what I did with it, but I could re-create that perl script which makes 
graphical versions of the dungeons. Or, even better, I could do it in Qt and 
re-use my code which turns the dm text files into one big graphic. That would 
limit it to running on servers which have Qt installed, but the web server I 
admin does ;).

> >Actually... DM doesn't really care where the dungeon grid comes from,
> >so I could even generate that in PHP using user-given parameters, then
> >feed it to DM when I call it (by saving it to a temp file, or sending
> >it in via stdin).
>
> You mean letting the user position wall tiles (and by implication rooms and
> whatever they desire) before the WallCrawlers are let loose? 

Basically, provide them with a way to input the dungeon parameters over the 
web, instead of providing an input file. This was the idea behind using a 
hashtable-like object to store a dungeon's config data - then entering the 
data is the same no matter what the source (a key=value scheme, which is 
easily parsable, no matter what language the front-end is written in). The 
front-end would be written in PHP, so couldn't start up c-based DM objects 
directly. It'd have to write the parameters to a temp file, run the dungeon, 
and then offer the user the option of editing it.

> That would be
> pretty cool I think. But if you did that, why stop there, why not let the
> user also place the design Crawlers? 

no reason not to.

> That would actually be an interesting
> interactive game all by itself. 

it would certainly be interesting to see what the crawlers do if started in 
different positions. (It would be even cooler to see them step through it, of 
course, but that's not something I'm shooting for soon.)

> And writing that as a web app should also
> make it easier to write a DungeonDesigner. I wonder: Would it be possible
> to design an interface that could work with a PHP-web-frontend for one-shot
> dungeon design and a QUB-frontend for interactive dungeon design? That
> would be way cool, I think.


I think it is "mostly possible". I mean we can't re-use 100% of the code 
across all user interfaces. But we can re-use the data i/o mechanics. If we 
use a key=value scheme for storing the dungeon/crawler/etc data, that format 
is very easy to parse, write, and store internally in Qt and PHP (and std C++ 
and Perl for that matter). Thus any app which could write a key=val file 
could do so, then launch dm with the name of that file. DM's output comes 
back via stdin or via another output file, if the execution command redirects 
stdin to a file. QUB, being C++, can even use the exact same config object as 
DM (except that I'll need to rename one or use namespaces, since they have 
the same name, but completely different code). For a PHP app I could pick up 
one of the many freely-available config-file objects laying around the net.

I'm thinking now that a web-based app would even be better than a local one, 
for this purpose, provided that it's easy enough to save/restore your 
configuration options. I can imagine a site which provides tweakable dungeon 
templates, and the ability to save/load your own templates. I've been getting 
back more and more into PHP lately for this work project, so that would be 
something I'd enjoy doing. As a side-project of the work project, I've been 
developing a very simplistic web application framework in PHP. "WebDM" would 
make a nice playground for that development, as well. Working on that would 
also help me finally decide on a final format for the save/load data, since I 
could see it from another perspective and possibly find "portability 
problems" with it sooner.

If someone had access to that they wouldn't need to build any sources unless 
they wanted to mass-produce dungeons as I did for QUB's DungeonCrawler set.

I'm glad you're back!

----- st...@wa...
http://qub.sourceforge.net - http://gwm.rootonfire.org
http://byoo.rootonfire.org - http://dungeonmaker.sourceforge.net
"Now I'm not normally the kind of person who likes to trespass, but
sometimes you just find yourself over the line." -- Bob Dylan