Development Blog

From the process of doing more high level stuff and demos you might find you want to add features to facilitate what you’re doing.

But.. i 100% agree with you josh, and really look forward to more docs and making the excellent feature packed engine more useable, or easier to understand...Hmmm i dont really know how to explain it, but im sure you understand.

 

Andy

I think adding lua is a big step in the right direction, but with the implementation of class models being on their own island of scope is kind of a pain to work with. I just can't see it being feasible to make any sort of complex game using the editor/engine with just sending messages to class models.

 

I think at least we need a way to access any entity loaded anywhere. That should be able to be done with a simple GetEntity(name) where name is the name property setting. Targets are good but the are limiting and cumbersome. If I want to push a button to open a door, they are fine. But if I want some sort of scripted sequence of events to happen they are cumbersome.

 

Think of interactions like in Half-Life, a game I know you like. When you walk into a room with a scientist and he starts talking to you. Then he walks over to a table and presses a button to open a door for you. How would you code that with LE currently in lua? It would be a major pain if possible at all with the editor/engine provided.

 

This is the problem I'm trying to solve. The above could be as easy as:

 

function MyScript()
  DoSound("talk.wav") -- this would wait until the wav file is complete to continue but doesn't block the game
  DoMove(GetEntity("scientist1"), GetEntity("pivot1")) -- this would wait to continue until the model scientist1 gets to pivot1
  DoAnimation(GetEntity("scientist1"), "press_button") -- this would wait to continue until press_button animation is complete
  DoMove(GetEntity("door1"), GetEntity("pivot2)) -- returns after the door1 is at pivot2
end

 

This is all very possible in the editor/engine executable right now IF there is a way go get any entity loaded by name AND someway create global lua tables that all class model lua scripts can read/write to.

 

Imagine the speed of editing/testing such interactive situations. Because it would be so fast and easy to create and test these things we could see amazingly interactive environments.

Targets. You can link objects by clicking on one and dragging the mouse to another, then releasing. There are 8 target indexes you can select in the menu. You can retrieve the targets with entity:GetTarget().

despite the fact that i'm more predisposed towards c++ and/or blitzMax, i'm giving lua a fair chance...

 

what i'd like to see are some basic conceptual tuts (or explanations)... for example...

 

what is a class script... how do you make it...

 

how do you compile a script to psuedo code...

 

stuff like that...

 

 

overall... the new editor is performing way past expectations... the level of faults is amazingly low... and the lua integration is working out exactly as it was advertised...

 

 

overall... in my opinion, 2.3 is a successful major release...

 

--Mike

I think BlitzMax is the best language to use, but people won't use it because they have never heard of it. C/C++ is pretty hard for beginners, so Lua offers a good combination of what people want. It is a well-known name, so people won't reject it for being unknown, and it is a lot easier for them to achieve progress with.

One of the issues with BMax is that if the major company's used it to create games it might be taken more seriously. Until then it's C/C++. If there is no market for BMax in game studios then there isn't any incentive to learn it/use it.

There's still plenty of incentive to learn it, its bloody powerful, quick to use and the syntax is more soothing on the brain! I studied C and C++ at Uni but still decided that BMax was the correct choice for my games. But everyone is different.

For version 3.0 on the consoles and PC we will have to use C++ and Lua. Until then, it makes sense to use BMX for the PC, Mac, and Linux.

There's still plenty of incentive to learn it, its bloody powerful, quick to use and the syntax is more soothing on the brain! I studied C and C++ at Uni but still decided that BMax was the correct choice for my games. But everyone is different.

 

 

That's still little incentive for anyone wanting to get into the business as a game programmer knowing everyone uses C/C++. I'd love to program in VB for the same reason you stated, but tell a company you created a game using VB and they'll laugh at you.