On Dec 26, 2007 3:52 PM, Gerard Krol <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi everybody, > > You all know we are in the possession of our very own scripting > language. From time to time the question has been raised if we'd want to > replace the home grown language with something more standard. The > advantages would be: > > * We don't need to maintain the old scripting language anymore > * We would gain extra flexibility in the scripts > > The main disadvantage is however that we would need to convert all > existing scripts to the new format. I believe this is possible using a > modified version of the script parser that is used in Warzone.
Even without being able to automate any part of the conversion process, I feel that this is a worthwhile project. The less proprietary stuff we have to deal with in the long term, the better. I say this particularly as the guy who had to convert our file storage format loading and saving routines to deal with different endians, a problem that still brings up bugs over a year and a half later. > For the new scripting language to use the only competition was between > Lua and Python. I am fan of Python as a language, but the ease of which > Lua can be embedded amazed me. If we are going to switch I'd definitely > recommend Lua. I'm currently writing a new sequence system using Lua, > and I'm really pleased by the ease of working with Lua & the C API. Python is too heavy-weight. I don't know much about Lua other than that it is popular and easily embedded. GNU Guile (a Scheme interpreter) is another option that we could explore. It may also be worth finding a language that can be bytecode-interpreted, possibly even loading bytecode files from disk instead of recompiling them each time the scripts are loaded by the game. This could improve both runtime performance and loading time. (It appears that Lua may have this capability.) > Please tell me what you think about switching to Lua as our scripting > language. It beats walkin'. :P _______________________________________________ Warzone-dev mailing list Warzone-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/warzone-dev
