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Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Posted: 02 Jul 2018, 20:49
by Ravenwing
Content creator's perspective. I don't really care what language we use because I'm going to have to learn it basically from scratch anyway.

Maybe what would help is identifying why we didn't like OldScript to begin with. Part of it was error checking, but that's going to be taken care of no matter what. Part of it was also syntax wasn't it? That's something we'll be stuck with once we choose a language, so maybe that's what we should focus on. You all are the experts, but I would use what we didn't like to decide on the things we won't be able to change, and then build around that.

As helpful as having a really popular language that has tons of external documentation is, most of it probably isn't "accessible" to the average modder. Wareya is right, we're going to have to write extensive documentation either way.

An above average modder is very likely familiar with a scripting language or two. I imagine most people are expecting to have to learn a bunch of new stuff regardless, but at least if the language is set up like other languages, it will be easier to adapt to.

Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Posted: 02 Jul 2018, 21:23
by Shnatsel
If we go for something relatively obscure we lose some of the key advantages we'd get by transitioning, namely:
  1. Lots of people already know it
  2. Has extensive documentation, tutorials and Q&A, as a result of 1
  3. Has pre-existing tooling (profilers, etc) that we would not have to reimplement
  4. Has a pre-existing, well-tested, optimized implementation that we do not have to maintain or patch
AngelScript is an entirely interpreted language, no JIT. Tooling boils down to "you can register callbacks in the interpreter and use them to implement a tracer, debugger or profiler". There is a total of 19 questions on StackOverflow tagged "AngelScript".

At this rate oldscript+ is a more attractive proposition than AngelScript!

Compare this to LuaJIT, which has perhaps the most competent tracing JIT around, exposes similar interfaces for debugging and tracing but comes with a low-overhead sampling profiler, and has 14,000 StackOverflow questions.

Or to JavaScript, that is the #1 tag on stackoverflow and has embeddable implementations like duktape in case full-blown v8 turns out to be too time-consuming to integrate. Although the language itself is a horror show.

Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Posted: 02 Jul 2018, 23:47
by AnyOldName3
I cannot express how much I don't want Javascript.

Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Posted: 03 Jul 2018, 02:46
by Thunderforge
AnyOldName3 wrote: 02 Jul 2018, 23:47 I cannot express how much I don't want Javascript.
Can you express your reasons at least?

As Ravenwing said, identifying the reasons we don’t like it can be quite helpful in picking a language that we do like.

Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Posted: 03 Jul 2018, 03:17
by wareya
Javascript's type system is worse than Game Maker's.

And that's saying a lot.

Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Posted: 03 Jul 2018, 13:41
by AnyOldName3
Googling 'wat JavaScript' should bring up a quite well-known talk someone did on some of the unintuitive things JS likes to do. We don't want a language with unintuitive behaviour.

Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Posted: 03 Jul 2018, 14:15
by psi29a
So what do you expect by running this code?

Code: Select all

Array(16).join('hero'-1) + "Batman";
Did you expect this?
Spoiler: Show
At least with Python you would get:
Spoiler: Show
I assume that Lua does type checking as well.

Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Posted: 05 Jul 2018, 16:30
by erretel
I just want to cast a vote if favor of C#. For a couple of reasons:

1- Thanks to Unity C# has a ton of easy to understand, easy to use tutorials, tips, helps and so on. If you have a problem and just type it on Google you're pretty much guaranteed that the first result will be an Stack Overflow thread filled with accessible and functional answers.

2- Also thanks to Unity there are tons of people who have familiarity with it. This is an important point, because not every Morrowind's fan is going to be a modder, but only those who have a desire to create, which is something that people who mess around with Unity clearly have.

Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Posted: 05 Jul 2018, 16:38
by psi29a
erretel wrote: 05 Jul 2018, 16:30 I just want to cast a vote if favor of C#. For a couple of reasons:

1- Thanks to Unity C# has a ton of easy to understand, easy to use tutorials, tips, helps and so on. If you have a problem and just type it on Google you're pretty much guaranteed that the first result will be an Stack Overflow thread filled with accessible and functional answers.

2- Also thanks to Unity there are tons of people who have familiarity with it. This is an important point, because not every Morrowind's fan is going to be a modder, but only those who have a desire to create, which is something that people who mess around with Unity clearly have.
You could make the point that because of WoW, there has been more Lua exposure than with Unity. All the same points...

Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Posted: 05 Jul 2018, 17:20
by erretel
Is WoW modding larger than Unity?
Google give 40.000.000 results for "Unity Game", while only 15.000.000 for "Wow Mod".


Also I just thought that console commands right now in morrowind are based on oldscript, will the console also support newscript in the future?