I really do not like working with YAML. Every time I have to write or read a lot of YAML I fucking weep. The syntax just isn’t easy to glance over and feels like it’s mostly noise.
I’m just making this thread to brainstorm ideas.
Use a different language
YAML is both extremely flexible and also extremely restrictive at the same time. At the end of the day it’s based around a fixed set of 3 components: scalars, sequences, and mappings. This can represent a lot of data in many ways, but none really match how people think about it at a high level, I would suspect.
One alternative I’ve looked at is KDL, which didn’t even exist when we made SS14 use YAML years ago. Unlike YAML, its syntax is node-based, which may have some desirable aspects for us.
Take this simple prototype:
- type: entity
id: FooBar
parent: Baz
name: Real?
components:
- type: DoesTheThing
- type: AnotherThing
property: value
In something like KDL, this could be represented as:
entity "Foobar" {
parent "Baz"
name "Real?"
components {
DoesTheThing
AnotherThing property="value"
// or alternatively
AnotherThing {
property "value"
}
}
}
I feel like this definitely has some benefits to readability:
- Avoids syntax noise from specifying
type:constantly - Prototype kind & ID are specified at the top of the prototype, always.
- Components with no properties (or components with little) can be written much more compactly than in YAML.
That said, I’m not 100% sure on some of the more nuanced syntaxes we’d need to support, like !type:. This may require workshopping.
Furthermore, I’m not sure that this is enough of an improvement on its own to warrant migrating hundreds of thousands of lines of YAML.
Of course, there is always the option of “fuck it, we make our own thing”, but I do still understand that buying into an existing ecosystem like KDL provides some benefits for us.
Try to change YAML’s syntax
We could try to keep working with YAML by changing the exact syntax we use. I’m not sure there’s many options for us here though.
Enforce better code standards
I suspect many of the problems with YAML being hard to read are just due to lack of comments and similar styling, which something like KDL wouldn’t even necessarily fix. I personally try to put good effort into this myself, but we’d really need mechanical enforcement.
Fuck it, Robust Editor
We become a REAL GAME ENGINE and get a COOL FANCY editor that can represent the data. I’ll see you in 2030.
All joking aside, I do earnestly believe an “editor” would be great regardless of what language we use, even if we have a language server. I suspect there’s many manipulations that can be done much more efficiently with a well-made GUI.
Language server
Something we would ideally want regardless is a language server. It’d enable better syntax highlighting (allow us to highlight types etc in the code), which would likely help somewhat to make important aspects pop out more. But it still can’t fix core language issues.
I’m having this listed here as a “maybe this is good enough to make the other points moot.”
