2024-10-17
Advanced game engine wizardry for visual programming environments
Publication
Publication
Visual programming environments empower end-users with interactive input and feedback mechanisms that support live and exploratory programming. For creating these environments, language engineers require enabling technology. Language workbenches and meta-programming languages support rapid construction of interpreter back-ends. Game engines are specifically created for rich interactive user experiences and have the potential to augment this technology even further with maintainable front-ends. However, these technologies presently live in separate technological spaces. We aim to automate the creation of visual programming environments by integrating the two. We propose Raven, a meta-framework for rapidly prototyping visual editors that exposes key 2D features of Godot in a programmable user interface. Using Raven's declarative notation, language engineers can concisely express the structure and styling of tree-based editors. We demonstrate our approach by: 1) integrating Raven into the Rascal language workbench; and 2) creating two editors for the live state machine language.
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| doi.org/10.1145/3689488.3689992 | |
| 3rd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Abstractions and Interactive Notations, Tools, and Environments | |
| Organisation | Software Analysis and Transformation |
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van Rozen, R., & Kletsko, E. (2024). Advanced game engine wizardry for visual programming environments. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Abstractions and Interactive Notations, Tools, and Environments (pp. 41–49). doi:10.1145/3689488.3689992 |
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