The Kestrel Development Kit aims to be a set of tools to aide and make it possible to develop content for the Kestrel Game Engine.
The Kestrel Development Kit is currently comprised of two major components. These are
- Kestrel Definition Language (KDL)
- Kestrel Assembler (kas)
Both of these are intended to allow content developers to produce content for the Kestrel engine, by converting definition files and image assets into a binary resource file format that is understood by Kestrel.
Both kas and KDL should allow content developers to be detached from the evolution of the Kestrel engine, and not having to consider specific changes to the resource format of Kestrel.
The Kestrel Assembler is a command line tool that takes an input file and 'assembles' it into a Kestrel Resource File. At present resource definitions are supplied in the form of a KDL file.
An example of invoking the assembler might be
kas -o plugin.kdat -f plugin.kdlThe Kestrel Definition Language is a specially designed Domain Specific Language (DSL) for representing Kestrel Resources in a textual format. See the KDL specification for complete documentation.
Below is an example of the KDL
` Add a new NPC character in to the game.
declare NPC {
new (id = #500, name = "snijj") {
spawn_system = government #128;
affiliation = #128;
ai_type = brave_trader;
aggression_range = close;
cowardice = 15%;
ship = #129;
weapon = #140 1 100;
weapon = #141 1 400;
credits = 1000;
hail = file("snijj_hail_pic.png");
comm_quote = 5;
hail_quote = 7;
flags = grudge | hail_grudge;
}
}