Re: Scripting (Was First step or something)

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Chris wrote:

> > C (or even Python).  If they have a language that's syntactically
> > simple and only just powerful enough to achieve 95% of the
> > relatively simple things that they'd generally need to do then they
> > get to enable and tweak relevant parts of the game-specific logic
> > themselves and instant gratification of seeing their content
> > in-context -- and the engine programmers get bothered less,
> > and can just go in to tweak and improve the content-logic as
> > necessary.
> 
> The counter-argument to this is that, unless you're using a VERY (as in
> practically english) simple scripting language, your content creators are
> going to have to learn at least basic programming, and basic programming is
> just about the same regardless of language.


If you buy into the idea that you want to debug your AI while the game is
running - or that end users can customize the game with new AI then
another plus for scripting is that it's generally crash-proof. Obviously
there may still be ways to abuse the scripting system and cause the game to
die but it would be dramatically less than with compiled languages.

Your Python (or whatever) interpreter will detect runtime errors and recover
from them - killing the script - but not the game engine.  If you have non-
programmers doing the scripting, that would be a *huge* benefit.

But (as with everything else) - it depends on many factors:

  * Your working environment (Who does the AI? Programmers? Artists?
    Level Designers? The end user?)

  * The nature of the game (Do you have 10,000 creatures all doing
    complex AI - or one or two just waiting to see if you are in
    range to shoot).

  * Your personal preferences (Maybe you dislike programming in
    Python/Java/anything-that-is-not-C++.  Maybe you *like* to use long
    compile/link cycles to think/document/shoot-NERF-guns-at-coworkers.)

  * The range of target hardware (If you are targetting 486's, you'd
    better save every CPU cycle - if you are saying "2.2GHz CPU's or
    better are required" then you have more time for AI!)


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