(German: “Schuster, bleib bei deinen Leisten.”)
Concerning the GDC Europe lecture i’m still planning to submit. I’ve given it much thought but even though the motivation and passion topics might be great to rant about, i don’t think i bring the background with me to sound truthful. Also i’m having a hard time coming up with the “result” of the talk, something that people should take out of the lecture, thinking “this is what i’m going to do now that i know what i know now”. Or something like that.
So i’m sticking with a topic i’m very familiar with even though it’s technical and it might limit my audience to Programmers, maybe Designers. The talk could be titled something like “BattleForge: Scripting Multiplayer Missions” and will introduce the proprietary Scripting language i’ve been in charge of over the seven years i’m with EA Phenomic. I will outline in how far the Scripting language is different from what you might be familiar with (including Lua, the language our Scripting language sits on top of, or utilizes). Statemachine, load-time execution, polling. Need more info?
Then i will delve into specific issues that we’ve encountered newly in BattleForge and how we designed the language to work with cooperative multiplayer missions as well as (finally) solving some legacy problems and making the language more powerful along the way. Especially enhancements that allow us to use quantor logic, eg. “for any”, “for all”, “for none” and “for not all”. Intrigued?
And obviously, there’s still room for improvement even though we’ve been using the scripting language with simply abbreviate “GDS” (stands for “GameData Scripting”, w00t!) for over 7 years now. Spawning units in ever increasing numbers is one. Why is that?
There is plenty of knowledge to be taken away with for both programmers and designers, so i think i’ll aim for a more high-level review of our scripting language instead of giving implementation details. Especially not on the C++ side – it’s just too straight-forward most of it, the more interesting aspects are the design decisions that went into the GDS system over the years and for BattleForge especially.
So, now … where do i apply … oh, here.
Gaming Horror - stay a while, stayyy forever!
