Scripters of Interlopers, What do you guys use?

[stoopdapoop]

I've been looking at scripting languages to integrate into a project of mine. I first decided on lua (over python), but then I rediscovered squirrel and it looks really promising.

What I really want to do is get an idea of what people are familiar with(if anything).

I know that the newer source games offer it as a scripting language, but I was wondering if anybody is actually familiar with it. The feature set looks really good, but I'm worried that if nobody uses it, then it might be hard to convince skilled artist-writers-designers-whatever to help me out if I ever need it. Lua seems pretty universal, but I'd much rather use Squirrel if I can get away with it.

[zombie@computer]

look what your users want and implement that. From a programmers perspective the differences between the languages are small (featureset is similar, syntax equally confusing, speed overall slow as shit), but from an artist/scripter, its easier to start with a language they already have experience in / know.

[nub]

As far as I know, LUA is really slow. I don't know how extensively you'd be using it, but games like Natural Selection 2 which run almost entirely on LUA have performance issues because of it. NS2 is very CPU intensive.

[SM Sith Lord]

As long as it's powerful enough for you, I'd go with the easiest one for you to implement.

[Garrador]

How about ruby?

[stoopdapoop]

look what your users want and implement that. From a programmers perspective the differences between the languages are small (featureset is similar, syntax equally confusing, speed overall slow as shit), but from an artist/scripter, its easier to start with a language they already have experience in / know.

Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly, the reason I'm asking loper's what they have experience with is because I don't actually have an "users" as it stands, and I'm just trying to see what people have experience with. While I personally like squirrel (no GC, easy to implement, basically made for game scripting), I'll ditch the thought in a heartbeat if nobody's ever heard of it.

As long as it's powerful enough for you, I'd go with the easiest one for you to implement.

well, the thing is that I wouldn't really be using it, it's for other people.

As far as I know, LUA is really slow. I don't know how extensively you'd be using it, but games like Natural Selection 2 which run almost entirely on LUA have performance issues because of it. NS2 is very CPU intensive.

I've heard that NS2 has CPU problems, but I seriously doubt that it's because of LUA. LUA is more than fast enough for limited scriping, there's no way that the interpreting cost is preventing the game from running reasonably. It's easy to point at lua and say "Lua is slower than other languages, and the game uses Lua for some things, so that must be why it's slow" but that line of reasoning is very flawed.

How about ruby?

I'm trying to latch onto whatever seems most popular at the moment, and Ruby aint it

[Garrador]

Ruby aint popular? Well thats a new one. Always been, and has been around for ages

Anyway then, good luck on the hunt for a lang!

[stoopdapoop]

Ruby aint popular? Well thats a new one. Always been, and has been around for ages

Anyway then, good luck on the hunt for a lang!

Well, I meant popular among people who don't consider themselves programmers. I don't know of any software besides RPGmaker that uses ruby as it's scriping language. Plus, Lua's been around longer than ruby

[Garrador]

Sure sure! I dont argue with that I just find Ruby easier and more flexible than Lua, although lua has a lot of nice ways of directly accessing C++ calls and whatnot. Not that familiar with Lua, but it (as mentioned above) seems to be much slower. As far as I'm concerned, a scripting language is only implemented to be able to easily change up characteristics on characters, weapons and gameplay elements without having to recompile. Doing too much in a scripting language will certainly hog the cpu.

Anyway, what kind of project are you developing??

[Plague]

As far as I know, LUA is really slow. I don't know how extensively you'd be using it, but games like Natural Selection 2 which run almost entirely on LUA have performance issues because of it. NS2 is very CPU intensive.

I've heard that NS2 has CPU problems, but I seriously doubt that it's because of LUA. LUA is more than fast enough for limited scriping, there's no way that the interpreting cost is preventing the game from running reasonably. It's easy to point at lua and say "Lua is slower than other languages, and the game uses Lua for some things, so that must be why it's slow" but that line of reasoning is very flawed.

I believe it was in fact an unoptimized Lua VM that was the culprit behind a lot of the CPU issues.
Not that Lua itself is the issue but as with any scripting language its how well you implement it.

[zombie@computer]

Since you are taking suggestions, have you considered javascript? its relatively new as basis for games (or scripts for games) but everybody knows javascript. Even my dog could use javascript to some extent.

Yeah, not really an option for large codebases as you need to implement it from the ground up, still, fun to think about it. In a few years time most games will be created using javascript.

[Garrador]

Interesting suggestion. Found a nice article: http://cplus.about.com/b/2009/01/26/usi ... ations.htm

Google's V8 javascript written in c++, compiles to machine code and seems quite easy to implement.

[ScarT]

I know Garry considered Javascript for Garry's mod at a point, but decided against it because there was so much Lua shit around already. Javascript would be really interesting.

[Stormy]

I think in the source community, at least, lua would be the way to go. It's the only one I have heard of being used in a source game and most people who 'mod' garrys mod claim to use it. It would be the most accessible to users of a source mod, I would think. But do people really bother modding mods? Are you making a mod?

That being said, I really enjoyed working on wolfires phoenix engine with angelscript, and David did a few posts on choosing a scripting language, and he considered lua as well. http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Choosing-a-scripting-language Have a read of that, might prove food for thought.

[marks]

Dudes, Python isn't really that slow.