Re: A few questions about scripting

Tool = Game, Game = Tool, it's the only way forward

James

On 29 Apr 2010, at 20:57, Mickael Pointier <[email protected]>  
wrote:

> 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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