https://github.com/shijbey/centrifuge
A cross-platform desktop tool for authoring narrative sifting patterns for the Talk of the Town simulationist story generator.
https://github.com/shijbey/centrifuge
social-simulation story-sifting visual-programming-editor
Last synced: about 2 months ago
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A cross-platform desktop tool for authoring narrative sifting patterns for the Talk of the Town simulationist story generator.
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/shijbey/centrifuge
- Owner: ShiJbey
- Created: 2021-04-28T16:09:08.000Z (about 4 years ago)
- Default Branch: main
- Last Pushed: 2021-10-11T16:06:09.000Z (over 3 years ago)
- Last Synced: 2025-02-02T18:45:00.857Z (4 months ago)
- Topics: social-simulation, story-sifting, visual-programming-editor
- Language: TypeScript
- Homepage:
- Size: 1.35 MB
- Stars: 2
- Watchers: 2
- Forks: 0
- Open Issues: 0
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
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README
# Centrifuge: Node-Based Sifting Pattern Editor
Centrifuge is a cross-platform visual programming tool that helps users author narrative sifting patterns for character-based simulated story worlds. Sifting patterns search the state of the simulation, looking for matching characters, events, and scenarios. Our goal with Centrifuge was to develop a tool that enables users to craft sifting patterns without learning a text-based programming syntax. Centrifuge is built on [DataScript](https://github.com/tonsky/datascript), an open-source in-memory database and datalog-based query language. Users drag-and-drop nodes that correspond to parts of DataScripts query syntax, and Centrifuge takes care of translating their pattern of nodes into a valid query.
The current version of Centrifuge is configured for use with the [_Talk of the Town_](https://github.com/james-owen-ryan/talktown) simulationist story generator. _Talk of the Town_ was the simulation back-end for the award-winning augmented reality live-acting game, [_Bad News_](https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~jor/publications/samuelBadNews.pdf).
We chose this simulation because in _Bad News_, one player acts as the _Wizard_. Their job is to find interesting characters in the simulation by manually coding inside a Python interpreter. This manual story sifting is a tedious process and requires knowledge of python programming and the internal simulation structure. Here is an example [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUnp44OkaQo) of gameplay.
## How to Use
1. Install a release build or clone a development version from GitHub (see instructions below)
2. Start the application and create a new editor tab.
3. Drag node types from the tray on the right, and drop them onto the editor
4. Click and drag from ports to create connections between nodes
- **Delete node:** Click the node to highlight, press _delete_ or _backspace_
- **Delete link:** Hold _shift_, click the link, press _delete_ or _backspace_
5. Click _Compile_ in the 'Output' tab to compile the diagrams into query code.
## Building Development Version
We use Yarn for package management. Please download it from npm with the following command.
```bash
npm i -g yarn
```
Then you can clone and run Centrifuge.
```bash
git clone https://github.com/ShiJbey/centrifuge.git
cd centrifuge
yarn
yarn start
```
## DataScript Syntax Support
The editor transforms patterns into valid [Datascript](https://github.com/tonsky/datascript) queries. DataScript is an free & open-source alternative to [Datomic](https://www.datomic.com/). Therefore it tries to offer the same query language features. Below are the features of the query language that Centrifuge does not currently support.
- [pull expressions\*](https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/query/query-data-reference.html#pull-expressions)
- [return maps](https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/query/query-data-reference.html#return-maps)
- [Aggregates](https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/query/query-data-reference.html#built-in-aggregates)
- [functions\*\*](https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/query/query-data-reference.html#functions)
- [get-else](https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/query/query-data-reference.html#get-else)
- [get-some](https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/query/query-data-reference.html#get-some)
- [ground](https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/query/query-data-reference.html#ground)
- [missing?](https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/query/query-data-reference.html#missing)
- [tuple](https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/query/query-data-reference.html#tuple)
- [untuple](https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/query/query-data-reference.html#untuple)
- [database scoping](https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/query/query-data-reference.html#rule-database-scoping)
\* Datascript JS API doesn't support in-query pull expressions
\*\* We have a prototype function node available, but there is not yet a framework for creating custom function nodes given a set configuration parameters.