THE GATE
The project is going on with more work on the editor.
I had some problems understanding how to handle certain widgets (like the text editor) in RapaGUI, the Gui toolkit for Hollywood (link), but I finally solved all the problems.
As you can see in the image below I’m working on a script editor, a tool that give me the ability to edit game scripts, both dialogues and terminals ones.
On the left side there is a list of all the available commands, each one with it’s template and a brief note (in the screenshot it’s not visible because the column is a bit tight) and the idea is to use keyboard shortcuts+mouse click to add the commands into the script box with or without the command’s template.
In the above image you can see what happens when I click the “Edit” button to edit a script attached to an event-locked door. In this case the script is a dialogue script, if the hero tries to open the door a dialogue (driven by that script) will be launched to inform the player why he cannot yet exit from that door.
The editor still misses some basic gadgets like the [Cancel] button, to cancel the editing, and [Confirm] button to update the edited script in the game data structures.
NEXT STEP: I’ve to complete the editor, and then I’ve to implement a save button in the doors section to complete doors editing.
I’m not planning to add syntax hilighting and syntax check for now, I don’t want to stay on this part too much, at least not for now.
COMAL
Lately I’ve discovered a programming language called COMAL that was released in 1996 for the Amiga, now it’s free and the author (Svend Daugaard Pedersen) has uploaded it on Aminet. I’ve found it on Archive.org and I was really curious about this language I’ve never heard of!
So I started to read the manual and I was really shocked because of it’s modernity for the time!
The image above is from Archive.org
I start searching the net and I found that this language was available for many retro platforms including the Commodore64! I also read that it was even faster of the inbuilt Basic v2 with way more features like structured programming and graphic primitives available at your finger tips!
From what I’ve seen this language is really awesome: it has several advanced features not available in the most common basic-like languages of the time.
For example it has native Object Oriented Programming with Inheritance, Constructors, Destructors, Methods , a very flexible data type system and you can also build event-driven applications.
Its IDE, a bit simple for modern times, it’s really good because it has syntax check while you type and auto identation amongs other features.
There are modules for almost all Amiga’s standard libraries and you can write your own modules using COMAL itself, assembler or C. The manual explains in details how to make your own modules with each method.
From what I can see the weakest module is the one that works with blitter objects and sprites but anyone can always write a better one or expand the included one 🙂
Here are some screenshots demonstrating its capabilities:
To make my reading of the manual a bit more pleasant I decided to transform the docs, which is a big plain text file, into an HTML file with proper nodes and tree structure (I use Trilium for this work) and make it available for everyone when I’ve finished.
The image above is from Trilium
It’s a pity that this masterpiece get lost and that’s why I’ve decided to investigate a bit more and to rewrite the manual for an easier to read and browsable document. I’m also fixing typos (there are a lot in the second part of the docs).
There is a note in the readme that says that the docs may be not up-to-date, I will try to find out what’s missing peeking at the modules 🙂
If you are interested in programming for the Amiga have a look at it if you want to try something different from the usual 90’s programming languages, but don’t forget to run the prefs program to change the language to English because as you start the IDE the default language will be Danish 🙂
I think I will try to make a little system utility just to test it out, but as you know, the priority is “The Gate”.
I didn’t want to stress you out and tell you how hard these last two months have been, I will only say that now it finally seems all over!
That’s it for now!
