Sashimi

Sashimi provides a small platform to play with interactive fiction programming concepts. It is not yet a complete IF engine, and may never be. ( It's not an immediate goal, for instance, to provide proper English output. )

Based on some ideas from Infom7, Sashimi uses a "scripting language" embedded inside of Go.

In the example story:

    s.The("container",
      Called("the cabinet"), In("the studio"),
      Is("openable", "closed").And("fixed in place"),
      Has("brief", "A huge cabinet, in the guise of an armoire, stands between the windows."),
      Has("description", "Large, and with a bit of an Art Nouveau theme going on in the shape of the doors."),
    )
    s.The("cabinet", IsKnownAs("armoire"))
    lookedUnderCabinet := false 
    s.The("cabinet", 
        When("looking under").Always(func(g G.Play) {
          if !lookedUnderCabinet {
              lookedUnderCabinet = true
              g.The("evil fish").Says(`"Dustbunnies," predicts the fish, with telling accuracy...`)
              g.StopHere()
          }
      }))

helps to produce the following game:

>x cabinet

Large, and with a bit of an Art Nouveau theme going on in the shape of the doors.

The evil fish is floating belly up! ...oh, curse. He was toying with you. As soon as he sees you looking, he goes back to swimming around.

>look under cabinet

evil fish: "Dustbunnies," predicts the fish, with telling accuracy...

Motivation

Why Go?

Go hits a nice middle-ground between scripting and C-like programming.

1. No semi-colons makes it slightly more English like than other options.
2. Back-quotes (`) for strings makes embedding dialog easier. (`"Actually, it's much easier," she said.`)
3. Quick to compile.
4. The AST package opens the possibility of extracting script callbacks and transforming them into other languages for other runtimes ( ex. lua with a custom C-runtime, javascript in a web-app, or C# for Unity. )

Why not Inform?

Inform is great, why not just experiment with it?

1. Inform is easy to read, but I find it's often difficult to write stories correctly; it always takes me a fair bit of trial and error to get what I want.
2. Not easily hackable, and I want to try new low-level features.
3. I would like to more easily split a single story into multiple files (for instance: for multiple authors.)
4. I would like to more readily incorporate 2D and 3D graphics.

Status and Goals

Sashimi is currently capable of handling short, one-room stories; but, it lacks many standard IF features, including save-load.

Possible future features, in no particular order:

( See the wiki for more indepth info. )

• A process for mocking up simple point-and-click adventure games ( in progress. )
• A more complete set of IF features, especially: movement from room-to-room, doors, clothing, dialog.
• Documentation for the current architecture.
• Continuous time ( instead of purely turn-based. )
• Sqlite storage for the game world, with the ability to merge data about story generated objects from non-story sources.
• Improved scripting: type injection for script callbacks, global variables, type inferencing, variants for object properties, prettier syntax, and improved relationship support...
• Improved support for testing stories: especially a way to test expected output.
• Improved object modeling: for instance, context state machines to support concepts such as "lockable", "openable", "rideable" ( instead of classes: "container", "door", "vehicle", etc. )
• AST translation of script callbacks into other programming languages.
• Some sort of web-based story editor.

Examples

Command line version:

The examples directory includes a version of A Day For Fresh Sushi ported from Inform7 with permission.

cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/ionous/sashimi/_examples
go run gofishgo.go

Command line options:

• --text: use the simpler text console ( default is the fancier "minicon" which has a status bar, colors, etc. )
• --verbose: prints full output of actions and events as they happen.
• --dump: print all script generated classes,instances,actions, etc. to stdout, then exit.

Suppported comands include:

• examine something, take something, open something, close something
• look, jump, smell, attack, kiss
• show something to someone, insert something into something else
• ...
• and, q (to quit)

Web version:

This is a work in progress. You need both this project and the sashimi-testapp. For example, from the sashimi-testapp root directory:

go run $GOPATH/src/github.com/ionous/sashimi/_examples/webapp.go -story sushi .

then browse to http://localhost:8080/app/, for something that looks something like this: