chapelr / harlowe-macro-api Goto Github PK

• Changers could use more examples and clean up.
• Warn about (or fix) basic macros taking over hooks.
• Wording and typos.

Do you think it would be possible to create a Steamworks API Macro using this?

It seems like basic macros that return stuff are launching themselves at hooks. Will investigate.

A gist with the source and documentation can be found here.

(If the documentation needs to be reworked to fit the rest of the site I can assist, but this is a pretty complicated macro to document.)

I found myself with a bunch of little complex calculations I needed to run regularly throughout my game, and I was able to halfway fake macros by making code-only passages that would read and write global variables to accept arguments and return results, and I could then (display:) the passage to run it.

That ended up being a hot mess, because the arguments and results would stick around forever as global variables, and the syntax was clumsy and verbose. Also, I had to use some complicated self-replacing hooks to make sure to not accidentally mess up the spacing and formatting on the calling passage.

I used this framework to hack into Harlowe ever so slightly to create real macro passages. This adds a (macro:) macro that accepts a suitable passage name (one that's been tagged with macro) and any arguments. The macro passage will immediately run off-screen, with the arguments array available in _args and the ability to return a value in _result. Everything is nicely isolated, and shouldn't interfere with the calling passage's formatting or variables.

For some additional sugar, tagging a passage with both macro and auto-macro will turn the entire passage into a first-class macro on startup, so you can just use (macro-name: <...arguments>) instead of (macro: "macro name", <...arguments>).

More detailed info and caveats are available in the gist itself.

More examples and maybe an example project.

I can look at Custom Macros for SC 2 for ideas of macros to port over.

Basic ideas that might be neat:

• Meter macros (simplified version) (tough)
• Articles macro set. (moderate)
• First macro. (easy)
• Speech box system. (moderate)
• Playtime system. (easy)