jollo wrote:Creating a version of pyprp, or whatever it's called, that uses a scripting language in the D'ni font; or rather, a text document detailing the code, which pyprp (I think it's called) reads, translates into code, enters into Blender, uses Blender to create models, etc. (perhaps not even using Blender) and then generates the file! We could include many textures with it to facilitate that need.
Of course, this could be very difficult, but then again it might not.
Jollo, to understand the difficulty of this you have to understand the difference between Writing as it is done in the Myst universe, and Age creation in real life.
In the Myst universe, Writers did not create Ages. They described an Age in broad terms, without a lot of details, and a link would be created to an EXISTING Age which most closely resembled what they had written. They did not have to describe every boulder and plant.
This would be possible, even easy, in real life if we had a huge library of Ages, with indexed keywords, so that a tool could match your description innatural language with an existing Age.
Since this is obviously not going to happen, the next possibility would be to have a huge library of prefabs: terrains, boulders, plants, buildings, props. They you would describe your Age using predetermined keywords in a natural language, and the tool would build the Age accordingly. Some games do that with GUI tools instead of languages, such as the Battlefield series of games. The downside is all Ages would look very similar to each other. Also we would have to build this huge library.
There may be another possibility. Prp files are files that precisely describe an Age. They are the descriptive books, but in binary form instead of natural language. It is possible to export a prp file in human-readable xml format using libPlasma tools. One further step would be to create a tool that translates between xml and some natural language. However this would be far removed from the simplicity you are seeking, because of the complex relationships between the different objects in prp files.