Guild of Writers

I joined solely so that I could make a suggestion:

Most English-like programming languages are difficult to use because, A: English has many ways to say something, & B: English has many synonyms.

Although I have not actually learned D'ni, I hereby make a proposition...

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.

So, what do you say?

EDIT: Sorry, had NO idea where to put this.

Can you post this in D'ni so we can get a feel for your suggestion?


As a small additional even a scripting language has a need for mathematical notation and symbols and at present D'ni lack this degree of notation. There is a request with RAWA who has yet to respond.

No; by scripting language, I meant we allow one to describe the word in D'ni, & PyRRP would generate the terrain - perhaps D'ni words required could be made up of compound D'ni words - e.g. island being "ground with water surrounding" or something like that.

Of course, this could also be something to be used with the Uru Live source code.

Perhaps expanding PyRRP to embed the interpreter to understand D'ni and allow one to code it and all that tech-ni-key talk. Perhaps some of the tech-ni-key people on this site could evaluate.

I believe you are at risk of blurring the boundary between the fictional world of D'ni and the real world. I personally have no real issue with this other than expressing a degree of common sense.

If all digitally created worlds were D'ni then I could see a reason.

You have clearly stated you joined to put forward this suggestion and I do not doubt you consider it a laudable idea. I can only speak for myself, as is the norm for this forum and I have written a few ages. Two are currently distributed on Drizzle so I am not writing this as a complete novice.

We can only speculate on Uru Live source code since it's not available yet. Let's see you here getting your hands dirty at the coal face. All suggestions from people using the code for real are entertained and I don't want you thinking it's being thrown out without consideration.

All you see here is my opinion as a result of my consideration to your suggestion. I can probably sum up my opinion in one Anglo-Saxon word "Bollocks" but of course that's just my opinion.

Oh, Bollocks is just a little harsh. I think if someone wishes to spend 20,000 man-hours writing 500,000 or so lines of code to implement a natural language compiler, he/she should feel free to do so. Just writing a successful Context Free Grammar alone could account as the basis for a doctoral thesis.

I like to think of it as constructive critique.

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.

Excellent post, Chacal!

I think I was more concise i got it down to one unambiguous word

Yeah, that works, too.