Display and Store Marble Run Tracks

A small video (see below) of a marble track using the lift extension demonstrates what can be done with GraviTrax®. New balls emerge from the lift in the lower left corner whenever the lift button is pressed.

A compact notation has been invented that allows to describe the placement of the GraviTrax® elements in a short text file. This text file can be saved in a (sqlite) database. A detailed description in German and an English description of this notation for marble tracks is available.

For the marble track visible in the video a text file wf_lift has been created using that notation. Its contents can be inspected to get an idea of how the notation of a marble track looks like. That file is among others contained in the zip file of run descriptions. The data in the text file get stored in the mentioned database. From there a human readable description can be generated using the program gravi which is contained in the perl package Game-MarbleRun. The program can also produce simple animated SVG graphics.

The graphics output from the file wf_zip has been generated with the (slightly modified) program gravi and is shown in the following two pictures. The first picture shows the complete animated track (stopping after 9 marbles have been released). In the second picture only the elements on the ground plane have been drawn.

A quick reference card in English and in German completes the documentation. A short README.md and a list of ChangeLog is also available. For Windows users that do not want to install perl on their computers a precompiled binary is available. It does not respect the installed language.To output text in german you have to use the -l de switch. Please use the program at your own risk.

There is also a git repository named marblerun at github where the development takes place.

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