mediator

Mediator

The Mediator game engine is designed to function as a usable replacement for the BYOND game engine.

Disclaimer

This does not work yet. This does not remotely work yet. I'm not even sure it's ever going to work. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Overview

It contains the following components:

• A DreamMaker-inspired object model implemented in Go.
• A server-side Go game engine, using the object model.
• A webclient and communication protocol to let users play games in the engine.
• Parsers for some of BYOND's resource formats, like icons and maps.

It is also intended to contain the following component:

• A source-to-source transpiler from BYOND to Go.

Motivation

The intention of this engine is to provide a platform on which complex BYOND games could be allowed to run on free software platforms: it is intended to be able to be developed and hosted run on Linux, and be played from any modern web browser on any platform that has a modern web browser.

The intention is not to be perfectly compatible with BYOND; I expect that any large game being ported will require some patching before and after source-to-source transpilation. That's considered fine, although of course I'd like to minimize that as much as possible.

(Yes, BYOND has a web client, but my understanding is that it doesn't work well for complex BYOND games.)

This is, of course, a lofty goal, so don't expect this effort to necessarily succeed.

Trying it out

See the instructions in the examples repository.

FAQ

Why is this not written as a reimplementation of the BYOND compiler and runtime?

Multiple reasons:

• BYOND is an incredibly complex platform. I don't want to deal with implementing a programming language from scratch if I can help it. By basing this on Go, and using a source-to-source transpiler, I can avoid having to debug complex machine code generation issues, and can have an easier time debugging, because the output of the transpiler is at least vaguely human-readable, unlike machine code.

• Using Go means that I can take advantage of the existing Go ecosystem for things like the HTTP library and WebSocket support, which makes things way easier.

• It provides a migration path for a game to move out of DreamMaker entirely.

• It means that additional hosting platforms can be more easily supported.

License

This is currently licensed under the GPL v3, but I'm considering moving it to the AGPL v3 if it gets anywhere.