how to store a math formula?

Hi

Im trying to create a framework for an turn based J-RPG, Ive been doing some research like looking how RPG maker works and I noticed they store entire formulas with variables an all, how do they do that?



I want my framework to be as generic as possible so I would like to do something similar

Thanks in advance!

 

Ever heard of compiler design? RPG Maker most likely reads that formula as a string, parses each of those variables, operators, and constants as tokens. They get thrown into some sort of custom compiler such that the formula can be calculated/interpreted and run during gameplay runtime.

EDIT:
Here are some examples from that very page:
http://www.tutorialspoint.com/compiler_design/compiler_design_lexical_analysis.htm
http://www.tutorialspoint.com/compiler_design/compiler_design_types_of_parsing.htm

 

I do something like this in my framework. I wrote a simple arithmetic evaluator for it:
https://github.com/lordofduct/space...ob/master/SpacepuppyBase/Dynamic/Evaluator.cs

An object can be passed in as well to pull values from, the syntax explains it. Unfortunately I currently only support one object passed in at a time.

That just does the calculations. I have various things that support it. You could just pass in strings manually. Or things like my VariantReference explicitly uses it:
https://github.com/lordofduct/space...lob/master/SpacepuppyBase/VariantReference.cs

As you can see here:


Unfortunately pulling this out of my framework is not trivial, but you can look it over to get an idea how I accomplish it.

Also, this runs slower than if it were actual code since it's parsed and interpreted at runtime.

 

Maybe a bit overkill for what you want to do, but you could integrate Lua within your project.

 

Thanks for the responses but I think writing a compiler is a bit too much for me, I will just writte individual scripts for each spell/ability.