Writing a BYOND scripting language

ID:152791
 
Oct 12 2005, 6:47 pm
Has anyone found a good way to incorpoare some sort of scripting language in byond games? Something that could be reread at runtime or reread when its brought into the game or called on to be loaded. Ive been toying with the idea of including a scripting system so I could make changes during beta game testing without having to reboot the world.

Say the find an item is to strong, then I just change the strength of the item in the script and reload it effectivly correcting the Item without a reboot. So has this been done before? and anyone have any tips on what the best way to handle this would be.
Oct 12 2005, 7:19 pm
Well, if all you want to change is data then I suggest you store it in an easily-modifiable format, such as XML. Or maybe a database, if you're running on a Unix server with access to MySQL. You might want to change the way you handle your items if you want to modify them dynamically like this, though; for example, you could define items entirely in data files and not hard-code any of them. This requires you to generalise any unique functionality of items, though, so that you can turn on and off that functionality on any item just by changing a setting or two.

There are scripting languages for BYOND around, though to be honest none of the publically available ones are any good. (At least, I haven't seen any good ones.) One of these days I really must get around to finishing and releasing my own general-purpose scripting language...

Rolling your own isn't too hard for a seasoned programmer. Read up on basic compiler theory if you're serious about it.
Oct 14 2005, 3:39 am
DoOmBringer wrote:
Say the find an item is to strong, then I just change the strength of the item in the script and reload it effectivly correcting the Item without a reboot. So has this been done before?

You could always use hub://Deadron.XML for this. =)
Oct 14 2005, 2:20 pm
In response to Wizkidd0123
Aye, I do use it for some things, but the other reason I am making a scripting language is so the clients can write scripts to create trigger effects for custom items and what not.