DSL and Configuration

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The CS1 Game Engine exposes a powerful and intuitive Domain Specific Language (DSL) Application Programming Interface (API). The CS1 Game Engine DSL is a set of methods and properties accessible via the CS1 global object. The names and locations of these methods and properties make sense in the context of programming a game.

Top Level CS1 Properties

CS1.Game

CS1.Scene

CS1.MyPlayer

CS1.Cam

CS1.Rig

CS1.Design

CS1.Utils

CS1.Flags

CS1.device

CS1.version

In addition various optional systems and primitives are designed to append top level API access. For example the cs1-jukebox primitive adds a reference at CS1.Jukebox.

CS1.Game includes a method CS1.Game.start() which does exactly what you would expects. It starts the game, at which time a game-start event is dispatched.

Another such sensibly named method is CS1.MyPlayer.setAvatar(). This method is not only available on CS1.MyPlayer, but also on any player instance.

You can think of the CS1 global object as a DSL tree composed of sensibly named methods and properties.

As of today, the CS1 Game Engine, and consequently the CS1 global object, are very incomplete as measured against the API Promises for version 1.0.0. Once these promises have been fullfilled, I will be developing game design and monitoring applications which will interact with the engine via user interfaces communicating through design and control layers/planes. The user interfaces may include GUIs and CLIs easing aspects of game design and server management. The design layer/plane will bind GUI widgets to a JSON configuration file. A flag set in CS1.Flags will inform the engine whether to import and perform API calls based on a JSON configuration file. This will enable end users to develop their own game design and level editors which write to such a configuration file. The control layer/plane will enable similar writes to a server configuration file as well as realtime CS1 Game Server API calls. Control layer applications can be designed by end users to ease server configuration and live server management. For example, such an application could do such things as configure database settings or boot players from a live game.

By first designing the global CS1 Game Engine and CS1 Game Server objects with set DSL, the design and control layers can cleanly encapsulate the behaviors of their intended use cases and prevent configuration references leaking into the core of the engine and server.