I play a lot of games on Board Game Arena (BGA!). A lot of those are turn based games with random people, but I have two subsets of games that I consider ‘more important’:

• Turn based games with people I know
• Alpha games I’m testing

Unfortunately, the first tends to have longer ‘per turn’ times and the latter doesn’t have a timer at all, so both end up right at the very end of the sorted table list. But both, I’d rather play first and in-between other games.

Super niche problems, I know.

Generally, my solution has been to keep a tab open for each of those games in a Firefox Tab Group, but in those cases, I keep navigating off those pages accidentally (thank you next table button).

Super super niche problems, now.

In any case, I whipped up a quick userscript (I use ViolentMonkey) that will:

• Detect if a tab I’m on is one of the games I want to ’lock’
• Remove the next table button (buttons; there are two different ones)
• Disable navigation (at least make it pop up a warning)
• Periodically refresh the tab (BGA tends to go to sleep in the background)

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Last time we had Runelang: A Bind Rune Generator. This time, let’s make ‘summoning circles’. Basically, we want to make a circle with stars and other circles inscribed and around the borders with various ‘mystic’ text in the mix. Something like this:

• generate_summoning_circle
  • random chance of boder
  • random chance of one or more inscribed stars
  • random chance of recurring on the border (calling generate_summoning_circle again)
  • random chance of recurring in the middle

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Continuing with my Runelang in the Browser series, I had the idea to automatically generate runes. So basically reversing the parsing step, rather than to take what I’ve written and make it look good, to write something that Runelang can parse–and still look good.

In a nutshell, I want to write a series of functions that can recursively call one another to render runes:

• generate_bind_rune
  • n times generate_bind_rune_arm
    • m times generate bars, circles, and other decrations
    • add a fork at the end

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As they say, life is what happens when you’re making other plans. But I’m back, so let’s talk some more about Runelang. In the interest of not dragging on months without finishing, we’re going to go ahead and push through the rest of the project. Onward!

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Earlier this week, we started parsing, getting through groups, nodes, params, and lists. A pretty good start, but it also leaves out two very powerful things (expressions and defines), one of which we absolutely do need to start actually evaluating things: expressions. Since we use them in every param, we pretty much need to know how to parse them, so let’s do it!

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I’m still here! And less sick now.

Last time(s), we described and lexed) Runelang! This time around, let’s take the lexed tokens and go one step further and parse them!

So, how do we go about this? With a recursive descent parser!

• Start with a list/stream of tokens
• Using the first k (in a LL(k) parser) elements of the list, identify which sort of object we are parsing (a group / identifier / literal / expression / etc)
• Call a parsing function for that object type (parseGroup etc) that will:
  • Recursively parse the given object type (this may in turn call more parse functions)
  • Advance the token stream ‘consuming’ any tokens used in this group so the new ‘first’ element is the next object

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Let’s LEX!

So this is actually one of the easier parts of a programming language. In this case, we need to turn the raw text of a program into a sequence of tokens / lexemes that will be easier to parse. In this case, we want to:

• Remove all whitespace and comments
• Store the row and column with the token to make debugging easier

So let’s do it!

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Previously, I wrote a post about making a DSL in Ruby that could render magic circles/runes. It worked pretty well. I could turn things like this:

rune do
    scale 0.9 do 
        circle
        polygon 7
        star 14, 3
        star 7, 2
        children 7, scale: 1/8r, offset: 1 do |i|
            circle
            invert do
                text (0x2641 + i).chr Encoding::UTF_8
            end
        end
    end
    scale 0.15 do
        translate x: -2 do circle; moon 0.45 end
        circle
        translate x: 2 do circle; moon 0.55 end
    end
end

Into this:

But… I decided to completely rewrite it. Now it’s an entirely separate language:

Output

Source

Log (most recent messages first):

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A quick script.

I play a lot of board games. With the whole COVID-19 mess, I’ve been playing a lot on Board Game Arena, which is a wonderful site. But one thing that’s a bit lacking is having ratings / metadata about games to great games I’ve just not heard about before. Where can you get lots of that data? Board Game Geek!

The problem though, is merging the two. So, how do we do it? Well, this time around, I’m going to start with this GeekList that someone else maintains of BGA games on BGG. Which has the games, but no ranks. And apparently there are no ways to rank those by BGG (for some reason). But that’s easy when you know a bit of scripting!

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One of the projects I’ve had vaguely in the back of my head is a sort of generic puzzle solver. I really love puzzles, but of the pencil and paper and video game varieties. So I think it would be awesome to write out a definition of a puzzle (say how to play Sudoku), give it input, and have it give me an answer back.

Well, I finally got around to trying it!

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