# Mapmaking Discussion & Philosophy (WIP/Critique) > Software Discussion >  WorldBuilder 2.0

## Alfar

It's been a while since I fired up a new thread, but I'm still working on WordBuilder. 

For version 2, I've reworked the dictionary and translator, and I'm very interested in feedback on those, but of course also on the application in general.

Download at http://whee.dk/wordbuilder/WordBuilder20.msi

Requires Windows and .NET framework 3.5sp1.

Documentation for the rules language at http://whee.dk/?page_id=65

Any questions, feel free to contact me.

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## Mettius

What does worldbuilder do? I may be dense, but it isn't obvious to me from the blog page.
Is this a name generator?

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## Alfar

Yes, well... a word generator. Generating names is one use for it. It also has a dictionary and translation function, so the words you generate can be stored with a meaning and such.

I've used it to populate a town with people as well, generating names and assigning occupations and such.

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## ravells

And it rocks! I highly suggest you give it a try!

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## Alfar

Thanks Ravs  :Wink: 

New version up:

http://whee.dk/wordbuilder/WordBuilder20.msi

In this version:
- fixed apply, so it will not loop endlessly if you branch inside your apply.
- fixed parser, so it allows multiple spaces between tokens.
- added rules picker to the code editor. Generate words to update the list.
- added search (ctrl+f) to the code editor.
- improved syntax highlighting, though performance is still not good with scripts over 1700 lines - this seems to be a general problem with the control I'm using. Might have to switch it *shudder*

Oh, and I've thrown the code into a github:

http://github.com/alfar/WordBuilder

Here you should be able to witness the mess of code that runs the WordBuilder app. I think most of the back-end parts are reasonable enough, but the UI. Ack. I have some refactoring to do.

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## ravells

Must, must get back to this....it is on my To Do list!!!

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## cfds

Looks great and very useful, but I just wanted to give it a try but realized that it needs .Net-Framework (what I could have read here in this thread..). Looks like I have to have a look at the code and build something suitable myself...
But great work nontheless.

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## Alfar

> Looks great and very useful, but I just wanted to give it a try but realized that it needs .Net-Framework (what I could have read here in this thread..). Looks like I have to have a look at the code and build something suitable myself...
> But great work nontheless.


Well, if you're on a non-windows system, I am working on a version that'll run under mono, so it should be possible to have it working in a linux setup or whatever. Would that be interesting?

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## su_liam

Yes. Yes it would.

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## Alfar

Ok, I've taken my first stab at a mono-compatible tool. Turns out I couldn't get MonoDevelop to build my VB code for some reason... So now I've spent some time converting the most important bits of code to C#, and it looks like I'm able to compile and run under mono.

What I have at the moment is a command line tool:



```
monowordbuilder <file_name>[ -v][ -r <starting_rule> <amount>]*
```

Which outputs a number of generated words, either just the root word or the larger output which contains marks and branches (using the -v argument).

If you don't enter any rules at the command line, it'll use the defaults you've set up in the .wordo file using the StartingRule directive. If there are none, it'll default to generating the 'root' rule 100 times.

Oh, and I've no idea how to package it, so if anyone's able to help out there, that'd be great. The source code is available at github.

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## KingdomAlion

Wondering if made for macintosh? I have MacBook. and i much want to use.

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## Alfar

A version that should be able to run under MacOS X is in the works. 

I don't have a mac, so I don't have any way to test for it specifically, though.

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## Alfar

Ok, I guess Im just about ready for folks to try this thing out.

http://whee.dk/wordbuilder/monowordbuilder.zip

Copy the contents of the zip into a directory of your choice and run it using:

Windows: doubleclick gtkwordbuilder.exe.

Mac/Linux: in a terminal, run the command mono gtkwordbuilder.exe

You will need an install as well. On the mono web page, you can find instructions for your operating system: http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html

Windows users will be able to run this with GTK# for .NET, a pretty small download.

Id love to hear about your experiences with trying this version out on non-windows systems.

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## ravells

You are the bomb, Alfr! I now have a few books with tables of roots of English / Scottish / Welsh placenames which should go into worldbuilder as a lexicon file. If I don't have the time to do them, can I scan them and send them to you?

Best

Ravs

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## Alfar

Heh - I suppose you could try, see what happens  :Wink: 

I might try to run them through some OCR software, at least, see what I can get out of them.

My main focus will be on the actual application, of course - it still has a lot of things I need to put in.

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## cfds

Ah, I should look more often into this forum. I will test it as soon as I get home.

[Edit] Ok, works with Ubuntu 9.??

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## Alfar

Alright! That's one person that got it working, other than me on my Windows XP using .NET Framework and the separate GTK# download.

cfds, have you had a chance to play with the app other than checking that it runs? Any opinions?

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## ravells

I've created two wordbuilder files this afternoon. One which will generate street names based on medieval professions for cities and the other a village / town / city name generator based on English toponymy roots. If I add to them I'll post the updates here.

Alfar, once you've finished laughing at my feeble coding skills feel free to polish it up!

Best

Ravs

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## Alfar

Ravs, that's pretty cool!

I've just tried it out in my new WordBuilder 3.0.0, which has syntax highlighting and new syntax features (c-style brackets and ; line endings if you want, or python-style blocks where the indentation level decides when the block ends) - Apart from a small issure with the new parser (it doesn't allow blank lines in the translate command), they work beautifully.

Check out the release here: http://whee.dk/?p=229

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## Isaac Thomas Riley

> It's been a while since I fired up a new thread, but I'm still working on WordBuilder. 
> 
> For version 2, I've reworked the dictionary and translator, and I'm very interested in feedback on those, but of course also on the application in general.
> 
> Download at http://whee.dk/wordbuilder/WordBuilder20.msi
> 
> Requires Windows and .NET framework 3.5sp1.
> 
> Documentation for the rules language at http://whee.dk/?page_id=65
> ...


I hate to bring this thread back to life, but what happened to the wordbuilder? The link doesn't work.

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## Alfar

Heh. Well, I lost interest a bit. The link in the post about the latest release does still work though.

http://whee.dk/?p=229

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## Isaac Thomas Riley

How do I get it to work? It looks promising.

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## Alfar

> How do I get it to work? It looks promising.


Thanks for the interest.  :Smile: 

Did you get it running? I tried to start the gtk version myself, but had no luck so far on my windows 10 machine. I'll try to grab the code off of github and compile a new version.

http://whee.dk/?page_id=65 has the best documentation that I know of. Someone on this forum was writing a guide, I believe, but I don't remember where it was.

/Arne

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## Isaac Thomas Riley

Not yet. I plan on trying to see if it'll work with win7 preferences. I do have gtk# installed on my system from mono.

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## Isaac Thomas Riley

Still no luck.  :Frown:

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## Alfar

Good news is I managed to get it built and running. 

Check out http://whee.dk/?p=293

I've packaged it up with all the dlls it supposedly needs. I hope that helps.

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## Isaac Thomas Riley

Still no luck. I have gtk, mono and 4.5 installed on my machine.  :Frown:

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## Isaac Thomas Riley

I got it to work, but now I need help generating words. :/

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## Alfar

Great that it's working. There's a quick guide by one of the patrons here at http://whee.dk/?page_id=187

If you look around on my site, there are other examples as well.

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## Isaac Thomas Riley

So I got something working. What does CSV mean in the exports?

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## selden

> So I got something working. What does CSV mean in the exports?


Comma Separated Values

It's a plain-text file format which has rows of information with several values on each line. There are commas in between the items on each line. This format is understood by all spreadsheet programs and is relatively easy to process if you write your own software.

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## johnvanvliet

you have "Mono" installed ???
then this is NOT a microsoft Windows install but a Linux or Apple install using WINE to run it 

mono is the port of Microsoft's patented and copyrighted C# -- aka Dot Net

from here
http://whee.dk/?p=229
it looks to need the microsoft C# port of GTK ( Gimp Tool Kit)

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## Alfar

> you have "Mono" installed ???
> then this is NOT a microsoft Windows install but a Linux or Apple install using WINE to run it 
> 
> mono is the port of Microsoft's patented and copyrighted C# -- aka Dot Net
> 
> from here
> http://whee.dk/?p=229
> it looks to need the microsoft C# port of GTK ( Gimp Tool Kit)


Yes, there was requests for it to run cross-platform, so I reworked the UI to use GTK. It should run just fine on .NET, though, as long as you have the necessary GTK dlls, which are included in the zip.

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## Isaac Thomas Riley

> you have "Mono" installed ???
> then this is NOT a microsoft Windows install but a Linux or Apple install using WINE to run it 
> 
> mono is the port of Microsoft's patented and copyrighted C# -- aka Dot Net
> 
> from here
> http://whee.dk/?p=229
> it looks to need the microsoft C# port of GTK ( Gimp Tool Kit)


I do have mono installed, but I also have gtk installed as well.

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## Alfar

Oh, out of curiosity, what are you going to use it for?  :Smile:

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## Isaac Thomas Riley

I'm trying to develop words for one of four conlangs I'm planning for my novel.

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## Alfar

Cool! What do you use for storing the words?

Let me know if you have any questions or need help doing something in WordBuilder.

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## TigerStripedDog

Can anyone give testament to how diverse the creations of this system can be?  Does it tend to give everything in the classic middle-european/tolkein fantasy style or does it branch out into other cultures and forms?

Thanks!


Tiger

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## Alfar

> Can anyone give testament to how diverse the creations of this system can be?  Does it tend to give everything in the classic middle-european/tolkein fantasy style or does it branch out into other cultures and forms?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> 
> Tiger


You can generate any kind of words/names - one way I've seen it used is to use lists of words or stems that can be combined in different ways. That'll give you words or names with a very specific feel, depending on your word lists. Another way is to build your token sets to create syllables, and then have the rules create your words from one to four syllables. If you look around on the blog at whee.dk, you'll find a few posts on Esolanean, a conlang I was working on back when.

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