MMORPG scripting language

Then you want Small.

> Free/LGPL
Its free.

> C or Basic like syntax
Virtually C syntax

> Resonably fast
Speed is good, absolutly brilliant if you use their just in time dll instead of interpreter.

> Allow use of internal functions. That means, if I have a C function, like, say move_player(int player_id,int x, int y); I want to be able to call it from the script.
Of course :-)

> Relatively simple to implement
A few months ago I did an intergration of small into my little test engine in about 3 hours. The documentation is superb.

Alan

Oops, I forgot the most important thing
It has to be multiplatform, since my server is written in SDL/SDL_net ...

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I would recommend Lua.

AlanKemp: Could you post a simple example of your Small integration? I looked into it, but I didn''t find it too attractive to use.

quote:

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Original post by Raduprv
Oops, I forgot the most important thing
It has to be multiplatform, since my server is written in SDL/SDL_net ...

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Lua is mulitplatform and there is a free for lua that you can use to communicate with SDL.

Thank you guys, for all your replies. I did download Small, and now I am looking into Lua.
If anyone else has other suggestions, please pst them.

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quote:

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Original post by stodge
AlanKemp: Could you post a simple example of your Small integration? I looked into it, but I didn''t find it too attractive to use.

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Not easily. It was just to test out how easy an intergation would be, and it was into the test framework that I use for testing any new features I am evaluating.

If you are having problems try the message board linked from the small site, the people on there are usually quite helpfull.

Alan

I hear Star Wars Galaxies uses Java for its server-side scripting.

[edited by - HenryAPe on January 10, 2003 9:47:46 AM]

I''ve used TCL as my scripting language for my AI and game flow control in a recent project. It''s a simple language to learn and not to difficult to export my C++ functions to.

Oh, it just occured to me that I might have a big problem, if i implement a scripting language, and let my users upload their scripts, without me checking them...
What if someone, out of stupidity and/or malice does something like:
while(1)eat_all_the_resources_like_there_is_no_tomorrow();

Is there any way to privent things like that, in any scripting language?



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Protection from that will have to come in the host application for the scripts, not the language itself. Even if a scripting language had some means of preventing such a resource-eating script, you couldn''t depend on it.

First of all, your server needs to be multi-threaded so that running these scripts doesn''t completely stop execution of the main server app. Second, you''ll want some sort of watchdog method built into your script host. For example, an event that is triggered if a user-run script does not finish execution within 1000ms or whatever your threshold is.

I''ve thought about doing this in a MMORPG game myself, and it''s pretty much impossible to do safely. This is something that old school MUD games did constantly -- allowed users to build areas and create new code. But invariably the setup in those situations was human oversight, and new code could not be dynamically added to the game. Being able to add new code (as in your scripting system) to the game at run-time is a whole new ball of wax, and one that is very hard to do in a secure manner. I think it''s a great idea though. I''ve often thought that a completely EMPTY world that just gave users scripting ability and world-building tools would be a great game... start with nothing and just let the users build it all.

Yes, I think I will ventually give up the whole idea fo scripting... it is too complicated, and, perhaps, slow too.
There is a massive online game, Furcadia www.furcadia.com that has a scripting language, called DS (Dragon Speach), which you can embedd in your maps. The scripting language doesn''t allow any execution control, so you can''t do stupid things.
In fact, it is something like:

"if player moves in square x,y then move player to x1,y1"
It is not a combat game, so you don''t need too advanced stuff anyway, usually the msot used features are teleporting people, locking parts of your map from others, etc.




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