Re: A few questions about scripting

On Thu, 29 Apr 2010 01:32:19 +1200, Brandon Van Every  
<[email protected]> wrote:

> The past is the past.  But given the languages that are available
> off-the-shelf today, would you still be inclined to roll your own?

I doubt it. What would be the point? If you want a general purpose  
embedded language you'd probably choose Lua. The situation was a lot less  
clear in 1998 though.

To be fair, developing the language, compiler and runtime initially didn't  
take that much programmer time - a couple of man months? But we did pay  
for a false start before, and maintenance later. Plus those two months  
pushed back some of the design schedule which had knock-on effects. The  
perils of starting from the ground up.

> Let alone roll 2 of your own.

I think I'd still be tempted to roll my own high level mission language,  
for the reasons in my earlier post. This feels like a good trade-off  
between coder effort (not much) and ease of building the game (much).

One thing I forgot to mention in the original pros/cons - a benefit of  
having a 'proper' language (and toolset) embedded in your game is it opens  
up a lot of modding possibilities. We even wrote our mod front end  
(selecting and activating multiple mods) in script as a post-release  
patch. But that's a PC-specific luxury, not many people can do that these  
days.

Will
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