Month: May 2012

Seven Spindles… named a winner in One Page Dungeon 2012 contest

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Seven Spindles and a McGuffin was named one of the 24 winners of the One Page Dungeon Contest 2012. I appreciate the honor, even more so than last year, because my entry this year wasn’t as good and the competition really kicked up a notch. Thank goodness they named more winners this time around!

At the time of this post, the main site for the contest seems to have fallen down, but there is a PDF containing all the winners on a different site. (And this guy reviewed them all, mentioning this entry as “bereft of flavor or charm”. Hoo-rah!) Once the site comes back up, though, check out all of the entries (over a hundred, I think). People really brought it this year.

In honor of this win, I’m releasing the source files for this dungeon (under the same CC licence as the PDF). This zip file contains one Adobe Illustrator file with the dungeon map and one InDesign file that links to the map and contains the text and other stuff. If you use these sources for something, drop me a link to the results in the comments.

LDraw language grammar for TextMate

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Data files for LDraw software, such as Bricksmith, are really just text files with a specific syntax, and it can be useful to treat these files as text by opening them in a text editor and manipulating the source directly. This is particularly true if you are using LPub to build instructions for the model, as editing the text directly is the only way to add certain commands to the file.

My text editor of choice, TextMate, supports large numbers of language grammars to provide syntax coloring. It also allows you to add your own. I threw together this one to get a bit of coloring into .ldr files:

{
   scopeName = 'source.ldr';
   firstLineMatch = '^0 FILE .+\.ldr$';
   fileTypes = ( 'ldr' );
   patterns = (
      {
	name = 'comment.line.ldraw';
        match = '^0 [^!].*$\n?';
      },
      {
	name = 'constant.other.ldraw';
        match = '^0 !.*$\n?';
      },
   );
}

To install this, pick Bundles→Bundle Editor→Edit Languages… from the menu bar. Click the + at the bottom of the window that comes up to create a new item. Then cut and paste the grammar. This should make your LDraw files go from what is shown on the left, to what is on the right:
Application of TextMate grammar