Brain storming

I sat down this morning and thought a bit more about which features we need to provide to game developers using GGS. I came up with some stuff that we hadn't written down previously, and also described our current things a bit more in detail.

One thing that we had discusses, but never really formalized was the idea of a rule enforcer, who checks if a rule is broken when a move is made, or rather, if a move is legal or not. Our supervisor had previously asked us if it would be possible to change the rules of the game while it was commencing, and this is a great way to do this, we think. The enforcer will have a list of all the rules, and checks each move against the rules, if a rule is broken, the enforcer will stop the player from performing the bad action. A bit like a policeman, or a judge in soccer.

The problem then becomes; how do we specify the rules of the game in such a way that they can be changed, and easily formulated? Mathias found a specification [1] for the GDL language, which in part does just this (and much more). Using a GDL dialect, or possibly a fully fledged GDL system, we could allow developers to form rules, and players to change some of them, on the fly.

The idea is that a developer writes the rules he/she wants players to be able to change (possibly all the rules) in GDL, passes them to the enforcer, and the player can then change them as she wishes.

On a side note, I will stop time-logging on the blog and do this on ping-pong instead.