S Expression

Introduction

SuperTux uses S-Expressions for the majority of its files. Its a datatype mostly known from the Lisp programming language. A Lisp expression is simply a list that contains stuff: integers (= numbers without decimal part), float/real numbers (= numbers with decimal part), symbols, strings, booleans and, most importantly, other lists.

The possibility to nest lists makes the format very flexible and a good choice as a general purpose file format for SuperTux. The list elements are encoded as following:

• Integer: simply the number
  • Examples: 8, 42 or 12442
• Float: simply the number with a dot as the decimal separator
  • Examples: 8.5, 23.0 or 0.002
• String (sequences of characters) should be enclosed in quotation marks.
  • Examples: “string”, “Hello`` ``World”, “One`` ``day`` ``after`` ``Tux`` ``had`` ``dreamed`` ``about`` ``Penny,`` ``...”.
  • Escaping: backslashes (\) are handled like C escape sequences and allow to embed quotation marks into a string by writing \". This is useful for scripts but also has an obvious downside: backslashes themselves must be escaped (\\).
• Boolean: A boolean is a logical value that has either the value true or false. #t stands for true and #f for false in a Lisp file.
• Symbol: Simply add the symbol. Symbols look like unquoted strings and give the lists their intended meaning. Examples for symbols are symbol, sprite, another-symbol. They tend to appear at the beginning of lists.
• List: You can nest lists in a Lisp file by enclosing the list in brackets. Example of a list with 2 symbols in it: (a list). A list with a string and three integer numbers: (“test” 1 2 3). A list containing two empty lists: ( () () ).

Whitespace (spaces, new lines and tabs) are ignored (unless they're inside a string, of course).

Comments are initiated with a semicolon (;). They comment out anything that follows until the end of the line.

Examples

Some examples of real files used in SuperTux follow. (Ellipsis (three dots) indicate that we left out some parts of the file.)

SuperTux Config File

(supertux-config
  (show_fps #f)
  (cheats #f)
  (video
    (fullscreen #t)
    (width 800)
    (height 600)
  )
  (audio
    (sound_enabled #t)
    (music_enabled #t)
  )
)

Level file

(supertux-level
 (version 2)
 (name   (_ "Yeti Test"))
 (author "Team")
 (sector
   (name  "main")
   (music  "bossattack.ogg")
   (gravity 10.000000)
   (tilemap
     (layer  "background")
     (solid #f)
     (speed  1.000000)
     (width  25)
     (height 20)
     (tiles 0 0 0 0 ... )
   (tilemap
     (layer  "interactive")
     (solid #t)
     (speed  1.000000)
     (width  25)
     (height 20)
     (tiles 11 11 11 ... )
   (tilemap
     (layer  "foreground")
     (solid #f)
     (speed  1.000000)
     (width  25)
     (height 20)
     (tiles 0 0  ... )
   (camera
     (mode "normal")
   )
   (background
     (image "semi_arctic.jpg")
     (speed 0.500000)
   )
   (yeti
     (x 2)
     (y 177)
     (dead-script "
Sound.play(\"sounds/invincible.wav\");
Text.set_text(\"You made it!\");
Text.set_font(\"big\");
Text.fade_in(1.5);
set_wakeup_time(4);
suspend();
DisplayEffect.fade_out(1.5);
set_wakeup_time(1.5);
suspend();
Level.finish();
")
     )
   )
 )
)

Category:Game Engine Category:File Formats