I linked to the technical overview of Loreline, a narrative language to write interactive fiction and dialogues in games, because it shows how Haxe can be used to create software that can run as a library on many other platforms.
Seems pretty promising. The language looks clean which I can't say for some of the alternatives.
The thing that I find so challenging about these types of systems is scaling up the richness of the playback.
Very quickly I find I need to integrate animations, lip sync, vfx, timed event triggers... For that you really need some kind of timeline. Delays don't cut it. So then these clean text driven systems are at best an early step in a large process or abandoned for a more integrated solution.
But I really do long for the ability to import simple narrative scripts like this even in a full production system.
One of these days I'll try to build the high production value system in a way that keeps both the full, in editor, narrative graph and the simple narrative script files alive and synced.
This is very interesting - I’ve tried to make custom syntaxes for describing dialog etc multiple times, for embedding into game projects, especially since things like Ink aren’t really amenable to porting to other languages easily. So the multitarget/multi-language focus is very attractive.
One thing I will say though - I think something that would set a language/toolset like this apart, would be a high quality UI for showing how different parts flow into each other (a diagrammatic view as an essential / main view instead of just eg an addon).
I mostly say that out of jealousy after seeing the kinds of tooling that companies like eg Obsidian have for writing dialog and narratives
I talk a bit about the roadmap there: https://loreline.app/en/journal/march-2026/, and yes, there are plans to make an actual app with UI that helps navigate and analyze the narrative content, it's just not the focus yet (better to have a solid language and runtimes to run it first). More should come on that subject during the year!
Now this is prime Hacker News content! Thank you. The idea of a narrative language is fascinating and I'll upvote anything that's using Haxe.
I took Haxe for a spin years ago and was really impressed, just haven't been able to find the excuse to use it in my day to day work. I find the idea of cross-platform transpilation rather than compilation to be very interesting. Particularly when working with platforms like iOS where Apple can change the ground underneath your feet, being able to continue to use first-party tools while writing in the language of your choice is a valuable niche.
Haxe is such a great piece of tech, which becomes more and more powerful as you get to know it better. I wish it was more used by companies and developers in general, but it's versatility is also what makes it hard to master I guess.
We use Haxe for a legacy PHP app. Its our secret weapon, im amazed why more PHP devs dont use Haxe, as its basically a better version of what typescript is to javascript.
We get all the bells and whistles, and a familiar feel, most new devs are up and running in a week with Haxe.
Compile times are instant, and tooling is good (lsp/testing/etc). LLMs also know Hace quite well as its an old language.
Loreline transpiles to Java, but from the diagram it looks like that only works with Android. Is it possible to use Loreline with Java on other platforms?
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 33.6 ms ] threadI linked to the technical overview of Loreline, a narrative language to write interactive fiction and dialogues in games, because it shows how Haxe can be used to create software that can run as a library on many other platforms.
You can try the language syntax directly here: https://loreline.app/en/playground/ And look at the code there: https://github.com/jeremyfa/loreline
Feel free to ask any question/feedback!
The thing that I find so challenging about these types of systems is scaling up the richness of the playback.
Very quickly I find I need to integrate animations, lip sync, vfx, timed event triggers... For that you really need some kind of timeline. Delays don't cut it. So then these clean text driven systems are at best an early step in a large process or abandoned for a more integrated solution.
But I really do long for the ability to import simple narrative scripts like this even in a full production system.
One of these days I'll try to build the high production value system in a way that keeps both the full, in editor, narrative graph and the simple narrative script files alive and synced.
One thing I will say though - I think something that would set a language/toolset like this apart, would be a high quality UI for showing how different parts flow into each other (a diagrammatic view as an essential / main view instead of just eg an addon).
I mostly say that out of jealousy after seeing the kinds of tooling that companies like eg Obsidian have for writing dialog and narratives
I took Haxe for a spin years ago and was really impressed, just haven't been able to find the excuse to use it in my day to day work. I find the idea of cross-platform transpilation rather than compilation to be very interesting. Particularly when working with platforms like iOS where Apple can change the ground underneath your feet, being able to continue to use first-party tools while writing in the language of your choice is a valuable niche.
We get all the bells and whistles, and a familiar feel, most new devs are up and running in a week with Haxe.
Compile times are instant, and tooling is good (lsp/testing/etc). LLMs also know Hace quite well as its an old language.
How would you say this is inspired by, and compares to, writing in literate programming languages like Inform 7?