ELiDE

The graphical interface, ELiDE, lets the developer change whatever they want about the world. A game made with ELiDE will be more restrictive about what the player is allowed to change, but all of the player’s input will be turned into changes to the world, which the rules may respond to however they need.

ELiDE has three columns. On the right are a lot of buttons to access the parts of ELiDE that aren’t visible right now, plus a couple of icons that you can drag into the middle. In the middle, you have a graphical display of the Character under consideration; dragging those icons here will make a new Place or Thing. To connect Places with Portals, press the button with the arrow on it, then drag from one Place to another. Press the button again when you’re done. On the left is the stat editor: it displays data that is stored in whatever entity is presently selected. You can select Places, Things, and Portals by clicking them–and once you’ve selected them, you can drag them elsewhere. If no Place, Thing, or Portal is selected, then the Character you are viewing is selected. There’s a button in the top-right to view another Character.

On the bottom left are some bits to let you manipulate time, mainly the Simulate and 1 Turn buttons. Simulate will start moving time forward when you press it, and stop when you press it again. There are also text fields with which you can enter the time by hand. Note that rules are only run when you advance time using Simulate or 1 Turn. The Tick field indicates how many changes have occurred in the current turn.

game

Tools to make it easier to script your own game using the ELiDE widgets.

graph

The default view on the state of the world.

board

pawn

Representations of Things

spot

Representations of Places

arrow

Representations of directed edges

grid

Alternate board view for graphs that are shaped like grids

screen

card

The widget used to represent functions in the rules editor

charmenu

The menu along the right side of the screen, where you can add things to the character

charsview

Menu for selecting which Character to work on

dialog

Simple data-driven UI interactions

menu

The menu along the left side of the screen, containing time controls and the stat editor

rulesview

Here you can assemble rules out of prewritten functions. First pick which rule to edit from the menu on the left, using the box at the bottom to add one if needed. Then go through the trigger, prereq, and action tabs, and drag the functions from the right pile to the left to include them in the rule. You may also reorder them within the left pile.

Rules made here will apply to the entity currently selected in the main screen. There is currently no graphical way to apply the same rulebook to many entities. You can, however, select nothing, in which case you get the option to edit rulebooks that apply to the current character overall.

spritebuilder

A screen to put together a graphic from premade parts for a Place or Thing.

dummy

The pawn and spot that you can drag to place into the world.

pallet

Individual menus of parts for the sprites.

statlist

A two-column table of an entity’s stats and their values. You can use this to build a primitive interface to your game, or just monitor the state of the world. By default, they are all shown as Readouts, which is to say, plain text.

By default, stats’ values are displayed as read-only text, but an entity with a dictionary stat named "_config" may display them other ways by setting a key with the same name as the stat to a dictionary value, with its key "control" set to one of:

• "readout" for the default read-only text display.

• "textinput" for editable text, to be parsed as a Python dictionary,

  list, tuple, or string. If the content cannot be parsed, it will be treated as a string. Surround the content with quotation marks if you want to be sure it is a string.

• "slider" for picking a number within a range. Set the keys "min"

  and "max" to specify the range.

• "togglebutton" for switching between True and False. To display

  a different string for each, set the keys "true_text" and "false_text".

statcfg

Configurator to change stat display modes within ELiDE.

stores

Editor widgets for strings and Python code.

Python Editor

Click the Python button to edit your game code in the IDE if you like. In this case, you can’t use any of the decorators. Choose the appropriate tab from Trigger, Prereq, or Action at the top, and the function you write will show up in the appropriate part of the rules editor.

Strings Editor

The LiSE engine has an attribute string that is accessed like a dictionary and used to store arbitrary strings, such as might be shown in a menu. You can edit those here. You can store strings for multiple languages, and switch between them programmatically by setting engine.string.language.

util

Miscellaneous helpful things

app

Entry point to ELiDE