May 19th, 2009
SF.net ships with a lot of cool features for projects: therefore, news will no longer be held on the project webspace but rather here, on this blog. It’s so much nicer, and so much easier to use (yep, I’m a lazy person!).
I’ll try to update this on a regular basis, though since it’s an oss project, based on free time and good will of anyone who participates, I don’t make an promises.
If you’d like to give your opinion about the upcoming release, discuss new features and stuff, feel free to check out our brand new forums!
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April 15th, 2009
Everybody in the current development team agree that we should get rid of the TCL script engine. However, doubts remains about which on we should get on with. There are plenty of script engine out there, and we have to find one for this project.
For those who don’t see the point of such an engine, I’ll say briefly that it allows both developers and users to add new features (or extend existing one) rapidly and efficiently. For instance, if the game looks unbalanced in some points, one could easily changed that by editing a few files and restart the game, rather than going through the whole compilation chain. Or, you could easily modify the AI because you think our one isn’t tough enough.
Anyway, right now we have narrowed the choice to two script engine : Javascript through the Google V8 engine, or Python through Boost.Python.
Though it looks like V8 is easier to embed, thanks to its design and its native C++ API, I tried Boost.Python and I’ve been able to embed it quite easily.
One may say “Check out the benchmarks, and you’ll have your answer!”. Short answer is yes, definitely. Long answer is that Boost.Python has been use in games such as Battlefield (though this a guess. Still they use Python), or Civilization IV, which make it a suitable choice, because it is likely that our audience has a suitable knowledge in Python.
To my mind, we should head towards Python, and this is our current direction, seeing the current mailing list discussion. However, this is not definitive and may change since the scripting engine interaction hasn’t been written yet.
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