Ok, I'm fairly new to the idea of scripting, but from what I've gathered, scripting is like a file format. It just stores values that you can read in (such as character stats), which you use to build areas of a game, usually one's where the same idea is repeated over and over again. An example is FPS guns. You would store the damage, ammo, reload time, reload animation, gun model etc. all in the script yeah? If that is the case, then I've been doing scripting for ages, just I've been storing the data in code (data statements, I use a darkbasic mostly). The thing that I want to clear up is, for example with the FPS weapons, if I wanted to have a special event, like the gun overheating, or having a certain particle effect applied to it, would that in any way be able to be put into the script? It seems to me that that would entail a lot of hard work and additions to the script, and would be pretty pointless as you would be coding the script around the idea of overheating weapons. If you wanted to add something else completely you'd have to add to the script again. Or is the general idea to hard code the special events like this, and just provide basic attributes in the script, and maybe a slot for activating one of these special events (which would use some of the basic values as well). Basically, I would like to know what the general idea is behind scripting, and how far you would usually take the scripting language before you started adding hard coded stuff. Thanks.

Quote: Original post by hpesoj
Ok, I'm fairly new to the idea of scripting, but from what I've gathered, scripting is like a file format. It just stores values that you can read in (such as character stats), which you use to build areas of a game, usually one's where the same idea is repeated over and over again. An example is FPS guns. You would store the damage, ammo, reload time, reload animation, gun model etc. all in the script yeah? .

I'd say that's scripting in it's most basic form. More advanced forms of scripting involve control structures (if..else, do..while, for, etc..) and calls to hardcoded functions in the "engine"

Functions eh? How would that happen? I guess just a conditional statement that checks for all the allowed scripting functions and calls the parallel hardcoded functions?

Modern scripting engines are full-fledged languages - the only difference is that they don't compile into bytecode engine code. Usually they're just used because they're faster to compile and far more portable then C++ code, as well as being more readable and specialised for the application at hand.

The ultimate example was Unreal Tournament, where the engine defined just the core libraries, and the game itself was implemented in a Java-like scripting language object inheritence tree.

The compromise occurs where you use engines for mapping - in that case, objects themselves aren't defined in script, strictly procedural stuff - event handlers for map events, and constructor calls to all the level objects. If the constructers are versitile enough, this could include supplying "function pointer" custom event handlers (coded in script) to the game objects.