TyD

TyD (Tynan's Tidy Data Language) is an open source data language created by Tynan Sylvester, to improve the layout of game-oriented data. You can read the official specification here(https://github.com/TynanSylvester/TyD).

Quick overview

Values in TyD can be simple_values, “quoted strings”, numbers, lists, tables or null. Values can be given a name, making them a record of name/value. You can make a table using curly brackets, and putting a list of records in it, separated by new lines or semicolons, e.g.

{
Name “Troll”
Health 10
}

You can also make a list using square brackets, and putting a list of values (not records), separated by new lines or semicolons, e.g.

[ 1; 2; 3 ]

You can put lists in tables and tables in lists, but note that when you put a table in a list, it shouldn’t have a name (since it’s not a record). A TyD Document should contain a list of records. Most TyD documents in Software Inc. contain a single table record. Localizations contain a list of string records.

Example

Table
	{#I’m a comment
	Record		SimpleValue
	Record2 	“Quoted string” #Quoted strings can span multiple lines
	Record3	5.6 #This is a simple number value
	Record4	null #TyD recognizes null values
	List 		[ very ; simple; list ]
	List2
		[
		“Multi line” #Remember to escape quotes in a quoted string like this \”
		“List”
		] #Lists can also have numbers
	ListOfTables
		[
			{
			Record “This is an anonymous table, since elements in lists can’t have names”
}
{
Record “Here’s another table”
}
]
	SubTable
		{
		Record “I heard you like tables”
}
}

In Software Inc.

Software Inc. uses a fork of Tynan’s C# implementation of TyD, which you can find here(https://github.com/khornel/TyDSharp). If you want to know why Software Inc. switched from XML to TyD, and not something else, you should read the comparison section of the TyD specification.(https://github.com/TynanSylvester/TyD#comparisons) Other than the reasons listed, TyD resembled C# a lot, which reduces friction during development and I would rather not rely on a third party closed-source solution when parsing data.