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

[Henningsen <al...@gl...>]

>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 ;).

Using Qt is OK. But I seem to remember that that big graphic took forever to
load on my browser. You'll have to keep an eye on load time;-(
...
>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 an STL "Map" type. Actually, that appears very attractive to
me. Hope I'll be able to use that when I do my next round of programming.

>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.)

I'm planning to make modifications that allow the output of a "movie" that
shows the dungeon growth. Actually that will not be such a big thing, the
data is of course all in there already, I'll just have to extract it and
output it properly. Probably use diff's to keep the data size in check.

>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.

Sounds good.

>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.

You could be having fun. Web-app-wise, do whatever you like, I have no stake
in that. And no knowledge of PHP. 

Peter