Comments on: Scripting in MMOs: The best/worst tool you’ll n/ever have

By: Scripts Are Misunderstood at Kill Ten Rats

Scripts Are Misunderstood at Kill Ten Rats — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 05:03:35 +0000

[…] Hartsman’s roundtable at IMGDC was about scripts, stemming from a blog fight that I had missed. I summarize the consensus as, “Scripts are often implemented poorly. If […]

By: Scott Hartsman - Off the Record » Catching Up

Scott Hartsman - Off the Record » Catching Up — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:23:21 +0000

[…] a topic that I hold near and dear, and thought it would make a good one for people to be able to explore a bit more in-depth in a […]

By: moo

moo — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:55:39 +0000

Java can actually be very fast if you have the right VM to run it. Typical workloads will be within a factor of 2 of the performance of C++. There are also excellent IDEs available for it, such as Eclipse. If you need industrial-strength scripting (e.g. to run the backend servers of your MMORPG) then its definitely worth a look.

By: Psychochild's Blog

Psychochild's Blog — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:03:45 +0000

The role of scripting for designers

It seems like everyone got together and decided to have an interesting discussion right as I was out of town. The issue brought up by Joe Ludwig was: No designer scripting. (http://programmerjoe.com/2007/10/31/scripting-in-potbs/) This assertion crea…

By: Moorgard

Moorgard — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 22:31:51 +0000

I just want to send you a grats for your opening sentence made up of a bunch of links. This blogger standby is really a staple of clever posting, and it’s good to see you add it to your repertoire.

Five is a good start, but you can’t *really* call yourself a pro blogger until you hit a run of seven. Don’t worry, you’ll get there someday.

Keep on truckin’!

By: Joe Ludwig’s Blog » Scripting for Designers

Joe Ludwig’s Blog » Scripting for Designers — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 18:39:13 +0000

[…] started a kerfuffle on the subject of designers writing scripts. Since my original post was more about our experience with Lua than about scripting for […]

By: Scott Hartsman

Scott Hartsman — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 16:47:41 +0000

I’d wager that’s largely because we don’t have a lot of MMO developers who feel free to talk about specifics of their projects, especially in ways that make them sound less than good. That’s still a relative rarity - We’re still all a young business.

I’ve seen that one predominantly as an artifact of #3 and #5 - How much of it is there, and what can it do in your app?

If the answers to those questions are “everywhere, there’s no alternative” and “it can do anything, since it runs the whole game,” even the uber CPUs of today are no match, for instance, for Java or Lua+GC with hundreds of running scripts, running main gameplay instead of exceptions, each chewing through megs and megs of RAM.

By: Joe Ludwig

Joe Ludwig — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 16:21:44 +0000

Interestingly enough, I haven’t seen a single post or comment that decries scripting for def’n 5 (Performance Killer). We had a performance problem with our use of Lua, but it was entirely that the garbage collector did a whole bunch of work all at once and skipped some frames to do it. If that work had been spread out so a little happened each frame it wouldn’t have been an issue. Runtime performance of scripts is really a non-issue with the super speedy computers we all have these days. (Remember when people talked about how much of the CPU should go to sound processing? Hah, those were the days!)

By: Designer Scripting (from Jeff Freeman)

Designer Scripting (from Jeff Freeman) — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 15:09:09 +0000

[…] some of the popular rationales used to justify positions for and against designer scripting, along with the actual reason for each: Those who are good at it like it. People who have cleaned up after those who are bad at it try to […]