Liquorice

Liquorice is a system for constructing levels by writing algorithms to describe the geometry. A Liquorice program is a series of instructions to move a virtual "turtle" or "pen", which define the walls, floors, rooms and monsters as it goes. Liquorice was closely inspired by WadC, and was written by Jon Dowland.

Liquorice is an embedded domain-specific language (eDSL) within the pure functional programming language Haskell.

Similar to WadC, Liquorice's strength is with structures that can be procedurally generated: a function can be written to create a pillar, for example, and then invoked any number of times to create many pillars.

Example script

The following script generates a triangular Sector with a different texture on each Sidedef.

-- simple example, triangle (for orientation); unique texture per line
import Liquorice.Monad
import Liquorice.Render

main = buildWad "example1.wad" $ runWadL $ do
    mid "ZZWOLF1"
    draw 128 0
    mid "ZZWOLF2"
    draw 0 128
    turnaround
    mid "ZZWOLF3"
    draw 128 128
    rightsector 0 128 160
    turnaround
    step 64 32
    thing

In Comparison to WadC

WadC the current state of the map being constructed in the "background" and does not provide the user with direct access to those data structures. Once a Line is placed, it is permanent. In comparison, a Liquorice user has access to the complete context at all times, and can modify existing structures. The example birds.hs, a conversion of a similar WadC program birds.wl, include geometric structures which are impossible to construct in WadC.

As Liquorice is a library within Haskell, the user can use all of Haskell and other libraries in the construction of their maps. In particular, infix numerical operators (1 + 2) are much more convenient than Polish notation in WadC (add(1,2)).

WadC is reasonably mature software with a GUI for development. Liquorice is experimental and requires the user to be familiar with Haskell and have a Haskell development environment installed.

External links

• Liquorice at GitHub
• birds.hs, conversion of WadC's birds.wl
• birds.zip, output of above with nodes added