rosshamish / catanlog Goto Github PK

Currently the pattern for buying things and playing development cards look like the following, respectively
player buys item, does_something_with_it
player plays dev card: card_name, does_something_with_it

Concrete examples being:
blue buys settlement, builds at (8 NW)
blue plays dev card: road builder, builds at (9 W) and (10 E)

It might simplify the reading and parsing if they looked more similar.

You might consider:
player action item_name, extra_information

Which would make it read more like:
blue buys road, builds at (8 NW)
blue plays road builder, builds at (9 W) and (10 E)

To a human it reads almost the same, but parsing it can be simplified a little.

Now the simple parser (read: not one using syntax trees and other fanciness) can split on ','. Everything before the comma is what the user did and everything after is information about precisely how they did it.

Before the comma always has three parts.
player is always the player
action is always "buy" or "build" (or other action names as they become necessary)

The action you see informs what you should expect to see in the third slot. If it's "buy" you should expect a settlement, city, road, etc. if it's "plays" you should expect a development card.

Once you know what to expect, you can look at item_name. Once you've seen the item name you will know how to parse what's on the other side of the comma.

Just a thought. If you don't like it, it's not a big deal. It's not as if it's unparseable now. Neat project, though.

You might consider adding optional timestamps to the file. Perhaps [2016-01-01T12:00:00.000Z] or even just the number of seconds since the game started [347].

It won't add much to the human-readable-ness of it. But it will add some more data for machine parsing. In terms of readable-ness the latter is probably a better option.

Why would anyone care about timestamps?

Well, if people start adopting your format there are some interesting possibilities. Having the timestamps will let you get information like average game length, average turn length, average turn length of a winning player, how does closeness to victory affect turn length, and possibly other things.

I think it would be interesting if this project picked up steam and the community generated hundreds or thousands of these files that we could pore over, extract data from, and create interesting analyses. But that requires that the information be captured and at a granular enough level.