[MUD-Dev] MOBPROG and other scripting languages

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

From: Lazarus [mailto:lazarus at ourplace.org]

> For my needs, the ability to access ALL fields of ALL objects in
> the game (where the word objects is used in the OO sense and not
> the game sense) from a single definition of the object in both the
> base implementation language and the script language becomes the
> most technically challanging requirement.  It becomes slightly
> more challanging when you have a pre-existing game in the base
> implementation language that you wish to minimize changes to.

This is something that I've been researching too. One approach is
that adopted by Unreal (IIRC haven't read their doc for a while so
its a bit hazy) whereby they have an abstact object description
language, which they then hafve a parser for that can generate raw
C++ code with stubs to bind it into the scripting language which can
interpret the abstract object description. This gives you the
advantage of speed, although you have to recompile whenever an
object changes which is a pain for a persistent world.

Alternatively, you could use name value pair objects with defined
get/set methods, but thats potentially very slow although I had some
sucess with that approach on a market data system I prototyped at
work. We had XML object schema's which gave a degree of type safety,
and being schema based, allowed us to create hash tables into the
objects vector of fields (all of type Object) to speed up name
resolution. The project was network based though, and the bottleneck
was throughput rather than our object management.  I was surprised
it was at all performanent frankly as I'd had issues with Java
before in that respect, and storing everything as an 'Object' made
me uneasy.

I'm writing my server under windows at the moment, so when I get
further along I will investigate doing it with VB script and
com/.net I think.  Frankly the scripting is a long way off for me.

Ref:

  Unreal Script
    http://unreal.epicgames.com/UnrealScript.htm
    http://unreal.epicgames.com/UTMagic.html

  Main Tech Docs Web Site
    http://unreal.epicgames.com/UTMagic.html


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