Dialogue is framework for Lua 5.2 that's an intersection of the Actor Model and an Entity Component System. Dialogue is a framework based strongly in the communication between objects through messages.
Dialogue hasn't been released yet but is almost ready. Take a look at Plans for the future? below.
Official documentation is here, but not yet complete.
Dialogue is a message-driven asynchronous framework. It was designed for a great amount of composition. Actors, this program's 'object' and 'entity', are blank containers which have scripts. Scripts are the typical 'component' and define what messages actors can handle.
But Dialogue got its name from more than a simple actor analogy -- at Dialogue's core is the ability for each actor to implicitly scope their messages. That's right! Actors reach a different audience by the way they speak to one another.
Download Lua5.2 or get the Lua5.2 developer files from your system's package manager.
Once you have Lua on your system, clone this repository and compile the program
by issuing the make command. There currently isn't a make install. Dialogue
is valid C99 with the only depedencies being POSIX threads and GNU readline.
I have personally compiled this on a OSX 10.10.3, Ubuntu 12.04/14.04. Dialogue doesn't currently support Windows.
Once you have it compiled, Dialogue expects a Lua file I typically call
stage.lua. Look into the pong tutorial in the source or in the
documentation. While both are incomplete they
still offer more than a few valid examples.
./dialogue stage.lua
This will boot up the interpreter and spin up the Dialogue you've created.
I plan to release v0.0 when:
- I have complete documentation up
- There is at least one tutorial available
This is all very soon (next week or three).
After that, I am looking into being able to record the messages and replay whatever it is that got recorded. And perhaps even edit it along the way. I don't think this is a stretch and seems plausible right now. And it has been my goal all along.