WorldBuilder 2.0

[Alfar]

It's been a while since I fired up a new thread, but I'm still working on WordBuilder.

For version 2, I've reworked the dictionary and translator, and I'm very interested in feedback on those, but of course also on the application in general.

Download at http://whee.dk/wordbuilder/WordBuilder20.msi

Requires Windows and .NET framework 3.5sp1.

Documentation for the rules language at http://whee.dk/?page_id=65

Any questions, feel free to contact me.

[Mettius]

What does worldbuilder do? I may be dense, but it isn't obvious to me from the blog page.
Is this a name generator?

[Alfar]

Yes, well... a word generator. Generating names is one use for it. It also has a dictionary and translation function, so the words you generate can be stored with a meaning and such.

I've used it to populate a town with people as well, generating names and assigning occupations and such.

[ravells]

And it rocks! I highly suggest you give it a try!

[Alfar]

Thanks Ravs

New version up:

http://whee.dk/wordbuilder/WordBuilder20.msi

In this version:
- fixed apply, so it will not loop endlessly if you branch inside your apply.
- fixed parser, so it allows multiple spaces between tokens.
- added rules picker to the code editor. Generate words to update the list.
- added search (ctrl+f) to the code editor.
- improved syntax highlighting, though performance is still not good with scripts over 1700 lines - this seems to be a general problem with the control I'm using. Might have to switch it *shudder*

Oh, and I've thrown the code into a github:

http://github.com/alfar/WordBuilder

Here you should be able to witness the mess of code that runs the WordBuilder app. I think most of the back-end parts are reasonable enough, but the UI. Ack. I have some refactoring to do.

[ravells]

Must, must get back to this....it is on my To Do list!!!

[cfds]

Looks great and very useful, but I just wanted to give it a try but realized that it needs .Net-Framework (what I could have read here in this thread..). Looks like I have to have a look at the code and build something suitable myself...
But great work nontheless.

[Alfar]

Looks great and very useful, but I just wanted to give it a try but realized that it needs .Net-Framework (what I could have read here in this thread..). Looks like I have to have a look at the code and build something suitable myself...
But great work nontheless.

Well, if you're on a non-windows system, I am working on a version that'll run under mono, so it should be possible to have it working in a linux setup or whatever. Would that be interesting?

[su_liam]

Yes. Yes it would.

[Alfar]

Ok, I've taken my first stab at a mono-compatible tool. Turns out I couldn't get MonoDevelop to build my VB code for some reason... So now I've spent some time converting the most important bits of code to C#, and it looks like I'm able to compile and run under mono.

What I have at the moment is a command line tool:

monowordbuilder <file_name>[ -v][ -r <starting_rule> <amount>]*

Which outputs a number of generated words, either just the root word or the larger output which contains marks and branches (using the -v argument).

If you don't enter any rules at the command line, it'll use the defaults you've set up in the .wordo file using the StartingRule directive. If there are none, it'll default to generating the 'root' rule 100 times.

Oh, and I've no idea how to package it, so if anyone's able to help out there, that'd be great. The source code is available at github.