Right before my vacation - and I mean RIGHT before the vacation as my notes were written in the airport lounge waiting for my flight to Jaipur - I was working on an old idea that D_Order hit me with one day. That would be to create our own graphical scripting language. It is actually far less daunting than it might sound. It has three prongs:
1 - By adding five metamemes to the standard library, we can short circuit a sizable percentage (I'll guess 80-90%) of designers' needs for custom script writing. These four would be:
- One for an equation (which uses the two below)
- One for a math operator
- One for a Property Reference
- One for selecting things (how we can dynamically select objects for actions)
- One for a state change
If we think for a bit on how to arrange them in the action, we can allow the designer to create most actions entirely by creating memes and not writing any script code. The object of the action could be selected. The action could take on the state change as a member and the magnitude of the state change could be built from the equation.
2 - Provide an "easy mode" variant of the graphs. The Memotica metameme spec is highly generalized. This makes it flexible, yet obtuse to read. John Q designer will just want to graph out an action and be done with it. If we provide a specialized "design palette" for agents, actions and stimuli, we regain some of the designer ease of use that was lost when migrating to memes/metamemes, but we retain the power and flexibility. These design palettes are used by editors to specify the memes. You can't design a metameme with a design palette, but if the metameme is designed and you have a design palette handy, you can use it as a proxy for graphing memes.
Today, I created the nucleus of an action design palette. It is nice and easy to read. Sure, it's not flexible, but actions are pretty fixed things and unlikely to be extended. Designers will likely just create memes and not extend or enhance the metamemes in any way. Agents and stimuli will be different, but we can think on that.
3 - Add editor dialogs for these fancy new design pallets. This will make Memotica accessible to many, many more people than would be willing to work with it using text editors. This of course falls to D_Order.
