Casanova: A Simple, High-Performance Language for Game Development

Abbadi, Mohamed; Giacomo, Francesco Di; Cortesi, Agostino; Spronck, Pieter; Costantini, Giulia; Maggiore, Giuseppe

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-19126-3_11

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Metacasanova has been evaluated in [9] by re-building the DSL for game development Casanova [1,2]. Even though the size of the code required to implement the language has been drastically reduced (almost 1/5 shorter), performance dropped dramatically.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For this reason, checking the types and accessing the memory requires to dynamically look up a symbol table defined with the abstractions provided by the meta-language. The need for performance is for Metacasanova important because it is being used to extend the DSL for games Casanova [1,2]. Thus, we formulate a second research question:…”

Section: Research Questionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this paper we present Metacasanova, a meta-compiler whose meta-language is based on operational semantics [10,12], which was a project whose goal was easing the development and extension of the DSL for games Casanova [1,2,11], and a possible extension that aims to improve the performance of languages built in Metacasanova. In Section 2 we further discuss how developing a compiler leads to repetitive steps that could be automated and we formulate the problem statement of this paper; in Section 3 we explain how the meta-language of Metacasanova is defined and what its semantics are; in Section 4 we explain how the meta-compilation process is implemented in Metacasanova and how the target code is generated; in Section 5 we propose a further language abstraction for Metacasanova in order to improve the performance of the generated code; in Section 6 we evaluate the performance of the code generated by Metacasanova after re-implementing Casanova [2], a DSL for game development, and a subset of the C language. We also evaluate the performance gain given by the presented code optimization.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Metacasanova: an optimized meta-compiler for domain-specific languages

Giacomo

Abbadi

Cortesi

et al. 2017

Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering

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Domain-Specific Languages (DSL's) offer language-level abstractions that General-Purpose Languages do not offer, thus speeding up the implementation of the solution of problems within a specific domain. Developers have the choice of developing a DSL by building an interpreter/compiler for it, which is a hard and time-consuming task, or embedding it in a host language, thus speeding up the development process but losing several advantages that having a dedicated compiler might bring. In this work we present a meta-compiler called Metacasanova, whose meta-language is based on operational semantics. Then, we propose a language extension with functors and modules that allows to embed the type system of a language definition inside the meta-type system of Metacasanova and improves the performance of manipulating data structures at run-time. Our results show that Metacasanova dramatically reduces the code lines required to develop a compiler, and that the running time of the Metaprogram is improved by embedding the host language type system in the meta-type system with the use of functors in the meta-language.CCS Concepts • Software and its engineering → Translator writing systems and compiler generators;

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Research Questionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Metacasanova: an optimized meta-compiler for domain-specific languages

Giacomo

Abbadi

Cortesi

et al. 2017

Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering

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“…Other interesting proposals suggest the integration with commercial game engines. This is the case of Casanova, a declarative programming language that allows the integration with the well-known Game Engine Unity [9] and which can also be used with other engines and libraries [10], [11]. However, Casanova is more oriented to developing games and not video games.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

XML-Based Video Game Description Language

Quiñones

Fernández-Leiva

2020

IEEE Access

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This paper presents the XML-based Video Game Description Language (XVGDL), a new language for specifying Video games which is based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML). The proposal is portable and extensible, and allows games to not only be defined at engine level but also includes specific features that can lead the game design process whilst simultaneously reducing the gap between game specification and its corresponding game implementation. XVGDL is as generic as possible, making it possible to describe different genres of games. This paper focuses on presenting the basis of the language. The paper describes the syntax as well as the components of XVGDL, and provides examples of their use. Defining games via XML structures provides all the advantages of the management of XML files and opens up interesting lines of research. Our proposal provides a number of novel features. So, XVGDL game definitions can be managed as any other XML file, which means that it can be automatically handled by any XML file management software. Another interesting feature is that XVGDL can specify game components (e.g., game Artificial), in-game processes (e.g., the procedural generation of maps) or in-game events (e.g., the checking of the conditions to end a game match) via the association with external (possibly non-XML) files. Moreover, XVGDL files can be easily validated as any XML file what means that validations against a particular Document Type Definition (DTD) or XML Schema Definition (XSD) are possible. In addition, the paper presents a first prototype implementation of a (text-based) interpreter that allows XVGDL game specifications as a playable game to be executed. This tool not only validates our proposal but also represents a first step towards smoothing the path to obtaining an executable version of a game from its game specification.INDEX TERMS Video game description language, extensible markup language, XML, game design, game tools.

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Taxonomy of Game Development Approaches

Abbadi

2016

Entertainment Computing and Serious Games

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Casanova: A Simple, High-Performance Language for Game Development

Cited by 6 publications

References 9 publications

Metacasanova: an optimized meta-compiler for domain-specific languages

Metacasanova: an optimized meta-compiler for domain-specific languages

XML-Based Video Game Description Language

Taxonomy of Game Development Approaches

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