Moving!

Despite a number of promising leads, all of my job resources have run dry. As such, in three days, I am moving back home to Charleston, SC. My spirits are up, actually - I expected to feel thoroughly defeated (which I did), but at the moment I'm happy. I'll get to see my friends and family again. That's the important thing.

Meanwhile, I haven't let the out-of-work situation hold me back from programming. If anything, I'm more prolific on my own projects than I was able to be before, what with the 8-hr a day grind. Most recently, I'm working on a new EQ2-related project. The project itself is, well, top-secret at the moment - but I can discuss one of its major components: a script lexer and parser.

Compiler design and implementation is definitely one of my favorite topics in computing. I may be one of the few people in the world who enjoys hand-writing parsers. I can easily say that the grammar I wrote for this particular lexer/parser is the most complex grammar I've written with the intention of actually parsing.

In the span of about 3 hours tonight, I've hand-written the lexer and recursive descent parser for this language, which builds the inputs into a state machine. I can't give away too many details, but suffice it to say that this system will automate some interesting tasks in EQ2 (much like other MacroCrafter software I've written) and will allow the user to change its behavior on the fly.

To be honest, I don't really expect the user to do much editing - although I intend for the scripts to be user-editable, I will likely be writing all the scripts myself and releasing them with the new software. What I really wanted out of this was an easy way for me to describe the logic that this software will execute.

Sorry I'm being vague. I haven't made any official posts regarding this stuff yet on the MC forums, and I don't want to jump the gun. I've made the mistake in the past regarding talking about projects and such on this and other venues, getting people's hopes up, and then either abandoning or shelving said project. People's feelings get hurt, I get complaints, etc. I shouldn't promise what I might not deliver - and this vagueness is part of that.

As for when I'll be announcing this -- well, it'll come once I flesh the concept out more, build more proof of concept bits, and start pinning stuff together. I think it'll be well-received - possibly more so than a hunter bot would...