Re: A few questions about scripting

Jon Watte a écrit :
> Regarding custom languages: how's the debugger support? I think the 
> debugger support for existing languages (Python, Lua, Erlang, 
> JavaScript, ActionScript etc)  is spotty enough that I wouldn't even 
> want to think about a language for which I'd have to write the 
> debugger. (And a language that could be debugged by gdb would be close 
> to "no debugger" anyway -- "slow" doesn't even begin to describe it, 
> and all the GUI wrappers on top of it ;-)
>
--
In Little Big Adventure, the whole game ran in the tool (MegaTool), or 
perhaps that was the other way around.
Still; you played the game in the tool, and when something did not work 
like you wanted, you would just bash the SPACE key and some menus would 
appear, then you could click on interactive elements (all shown with 
clickable rectangles around them), doing that would expose the 
associated script, with the game variables and flags. Then you could 
edit stuff, and go back to the game play testing.

In Time Commando we tested the approach of having the tool separated 
from the game, but we had in exchange a real time script debugger. You 
could select up to two interactive objects, and their running scripts 
would appear as a transparent overlay on top of the gameplay, with the 
lines run the last frame shown in RED while the non run lines would be 
shown in a different color. At the bottom the variables and flags were 
shown in a similar way.

The cool thing with the real time debugger, is that it made it very 
intuitive to test the distances and the activation of triggers, just 
move around, and suddendly see the script run another branch of 
conditional statements, move back and see the script go back to the 
first branch, etc... nice for testing traps, distance triggering 
behavior changes, complex interactions (like two enemies moving trying 
to attack you in a coordinated way (one in front one in the back))) etc...

We also had the ugly "ScriptBreak" instruction which would just break 
the game into the debugger, and also additionally a "dumb to file" the 
list of statements that have been executed frame per frame.

    Mickaël Pointier



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