Re: A few questions about scripting

On Wed, 28 Apr 2010 07:43:36 +1200, Mickael Pointier  
<[email protected]> wrote:

<snip excellent argument for concise domain-specific languages>

I think this

> - you get as many different scripts as you get people (too many ways to  
> do the same thing)

and this

> - programmers will write scripts that non programmers will not be able  
> to understand

are really important. As a programmer I find it far to easy to get excited  
about scripting languages at a language/implementation level. At Particle  
the team developed a domain specific language for scripting missions in  
I-War - it sounds similar to what you describe, with syntax like asm  
(mnemonics and arguments, one line to a construct) but with each  
instruction doing a whole lot of game relevant stuff.

For I-War 2, we knew we were making a much more complex game (free form  
vs. mission based) and we wanted to let the designers script some gameplay  
systems as well as missions. We developed a C-like script language with  
the usual extra bits (serialisation, calling native code or script code,  
dynamic loading, mild concurrency, etc.) to achieve this. All well and  
good, but while we achieved our objective of scripting the game systems  
quite well, the mission scripting got really difficult. The more powerful  
language was more verbose and there were lots of ways to do things. Note  
that this wasn't because the language core was very big, it wasn't, but  
because all the game-specific functionality was in packages of script or  
native code. So everything required wordy function calls. Great for  
extensibility, terrible for brevity.

For coders it was great, fun to write, fast turnaround with dynamic  
loading, and easy to prototype with. Some designers got it, and re-used  
code and created packages of useful stuff - they could script a mission in  
~20K of source code. Some didn't, and there was lots of duplication, and  
it took 100KB+ to do a similar thing. Given that we had a lot of mission  
content to create, this was clearly the wrong balance.

If I'd been smarter we would have kept the old script language, or  
something similar, as a third layer and used it for what it was clearly  
good at. If I'd been really smart we could have compiled it to the same  
bytecode so we'd only have had to maintain one runtime system.

In my defence I was a lot younger at the time...

Will
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