Design Quest Authoring Format

[saulrh]

• Choose a host format (Markdown, org-mode, bbcode, something else?)
• How are rules operations embedded?
• How does tooling interact with the quest authoring format?
• What libraries are we using? Are we developing our own libraries?

Artifacts: Design document, two examples of simple quests written in QAF to use for testing and to make sure that common use cases are supported.

[Celti]

WRT host format, if we use Markdown or org-mode then we'll need to extend the syntax quite a bit to meet the design requirements for text formatting.

Since bbcode is ultimately the rendering target I think it should always be possible to use it as source as well, but I think we want a simpler host markup as well.

[saulrh]

I don't know of any library support for bbcode and it's complex enough that implementing a parser would be out of scope, yeah. Maybe something like straight XML? As long as you're ruthless about avoiding attributes it's almost the same as bbcode:

<update>
Text text text text text <b>bold text</b> unbold text

<dice>
  1d100
</dice>

more text
</update>

Problem there would be fighting with your editor's opinions about whitespace.

[saulrh]

Then again, if we want to let users write with the editor of their choice, we probably want to handle line-wrapping for them. For example, compare bbcode to html - bbcode wants each paragraph to be on its own line, while html (and by extension markdown) suppresses quite a bit of whitespace. Filling paragraphs at render time would keep diffs much cleaner, if nothing else. The problem is that some quests will want to do fancy things with their whitespace.