MurMur

A lightweight language for writing dialog and cutscenes! This is intended to be easy to use but still able to create complex sequences and characters. This repo contains an interpreter that can help you to read texts written in the MurMur syntax for your C# game.

The interpreter, documentation and the language itself is still in a very early stage, so I would not recommend using it just yet.

Getting Started

For now just grab the MurMurMin folder and copy it to your project. In the future a pre-copiled DLL or a NUGET package might be the best option, but since the project is still very unstable it's recomended that you have the original files handy. Another option is to add the whole MurMurProject into yours, but that might be inconvenient, specially with unity.

Now you can just create a MurMurScript object, load a string containing the script and just ask for script.Next() for the next line. Yep, that simple.

string example = @"
#start
Hello world!
";

var script = new MurMurScript();
script.LoadString(example);
var line = script.Next();
Console.WriteLine(line.Text);

The MurMurLine object that the script.Next() method returns has the type of the current line (text, menu, EOF), the actual text and options.

Basic Syntax

@include:[another file.mur]

@init:
  variable = [foo]

#tag
  Line of dialog
  Another line, with a {variable} or {shake:2} method
  {menu:[Strings are under square brackets]}
    {option:[This is a menu option]}
      This option will render this line.
    {option:[This is another menu option]}
      The other option will render this other line and jump to another tag
      {skip:[another]}
  {end}
      
#another
  This is another tag!
  // This is a comment, so it won't show up
  You can also set values and make operations
  {foo = [abra]}
  {boo = [cadabra]}
  Let's say {foo + boo}

Lines

Basically, everything is a line. Lines can contain text or commands. Line breaks will stop the execution, return their value and wait for the next script.Next() to be called. Commands will keep running until the end of file is reached or until a line with text appears.

Commands

Anything inside curly braces ({ and }) will be considered a command, there are many types of commands, here's the most common ones:

String

{[Hello world!]}

In most languages " is used to separate a string text from the code, but since that character is often used in dialog we should use [ and ] to create text strings in MurMur.

Number

{35.7}

Numbers in MurMur use . to separate the decimal point. There's no distinction between integers, floats, doubles, etc. Everything is a float.

Simple Operation

{[just a string ] + [another string]} {[just a string ] + 123} {2 / 2}

You can append strings, numbers just like you can do in most languages. If you try to add a number to a string it will be automatically converted to a string.

Simple command

{command_or_variable_name}

This will check if command_or_variable_name is a method, then it will run the method and check if there's a returned value, if so it will append it to the current line text. If it's a variable it will just append the variable value to the current line text. If the name doesn't match anything it place ??command_name?? in the line text.

Command with parameters

{command_name:[string parameter], 123, true, [more parameters]}

{command_name([string parameter], 123, true, [more parameters])}

The same thing as the simple command, but will call a method with the parameters in front of the :. You can have as many parameters as you want. You can also call methods like most languages too, just open and close parenthesis in front of the mathod name and put the parameters inside.

Assing variable

{variable_to_assign = 2}

Create or change the value of a variable to a expression. You can perform simple operations such as {foo = 3 + 3} or {magic = [abra] + another_variable}.

Menu statement

{menu:[Strings are under square brackets]}
    {option:[This is a menu option], optionalCondition == 2}
      This option will render this line.
    {option:[This is another menu option], false}
      The other option will render this other line and jump to another tag
      {skip:[another]}
{end}

Headers

The header is a place for special commands and they should be declared before the tags start. They start with the @character

Defining method

You can define methods very easily in MurMur, just make sure you are not inside a tag. Just use @def and choose a name for it. Here's an example:

@def method_name parameter_1, more_params:
  variable = [foo] + parameter_1 + more_params
  value = some_other_method() + variable
  return value

Note that inside the @def block you don't use { or }, inside this block everything is considered a command, expression or a return statement. After defining a method you can call it in your script anywhere, just like any other simple command, this way: {method(1,2)} or {method: 1 ,2}.

Init header

The init header is a special method that runs right when the file is loaded. It should look something like this:

@def init:
  variable = [foo]
  
#someTag
  // Rest of the game...

It is a great place to initialize variables that will be used through the script, like characters names, colors and other shortcuts. Another good idea is to have a file that only has a init header and then you can include it in all other files in your game. This way you can have a consistent place to initialize values you will use through the whole game.

Including more files

It's not very practical to work with very long files, so you can break them down into multiple files. To do so, simply write this before starting with the tags of a file:

@include: [file to include]

It will search for the exact match, a .mur and .murmur file in the application folder. You can change the script path via C# too. Remember that you can include multiple files, and watch out, because you can accidentally include a file more than once.

Still working on the documentation, sorry, for now check the example project included in this repository

License

MIT License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the Software), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, andor sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

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saint11 / MurMur

Programming Languages