[Adonthell-devel] dialogue compiler and related issues

[Kai Sterker]

Unless there are any hidden bugs, I am finished with the dialogue
compiler. That means, the new dlgedit is ready to use, although some
features are missing yet.

Completing the stuff brought up a number of issues:

First of all, to allow using the shorter 
    'quest.variable = value'
instead of 
    'adonthell.gamedata_quest ("quest").set_val ("variable", value)'

the editor needs to know the available quests. The same is true for the
characters, since code like
    'Bjarn Fingolson.attribute = value'
is supported as well. So the names (and only the names) of characters
and quests must be known to the editor if shortcuts like the above are
used. Otherwise it couldn't tell characters, quests and local variables
apart.

Therefore each dialogue can be assigned to a 'project'. For example, the
dialogues of Waste's Edge would be attached to 'wastesedge'. When
loading the dialogue source (or assigning a new project), it tries to
find a game of the given project name and load the characters and quests
from that game. The reason for this implementation is that it means you
need not explicitly load character or quest data, just set the project
once. And by not storing the full path to the data, different people
should be able to work at the same dialogue no matter where the files
are installed on their boxes. The new game class proved to be very 
useful for that :).


Further, I added a few more files to libbase.a. As dlgedit needs
game.cc, quest.cc, character_base.cc, storage.cc and fileops.cc, and
since all those contain very basic things, I included them in libbase.a,
so dlgedit only needs to link to that. Hope that is okay


So much for what I did. Now on to what comes next. I'll start changing
the dialogue engine to use i18n and the new dialogue script interface.
The question is, should I make those changes to the v0.3 tree? I think
so, as that has a working window system, so I can easily test things.
That way we can also release a v0.3.3 with German and French (and
possibly other) data. Of course, as discussed earlier we also need true
type fonts for v0.3. Would be nice if you'd concentrate on that once you
have time, Joel. Then we might be able to release something in May.


Waiting for your comments,

Kai