Who wrote the tge scripting language and interpreter?

#1 As far as I'm aware, the scripting language goes clear back to Starsiege, maybe even the Earthsiege series.

As far as who created it, I wouldn't know. But the current encarnation was probably written by Mark F.

#2 Mark wrote it.

-Jeff Tunnell GG

#3 Home brewed... very cool. Good job Mark! I find the language very easy to work with and its great not having to exit the engine to test script changes. Hopefully the script will carryover into any future engines. ;)

Jeff,
Your internet connection's up (Btw nice flat).

Thanks for the info guys...

John.

#4 Actually, our connection is not up. I was answering from home.

As to the scripting language. We feel stongly that the "uber" game language is yet to be written. That is why we do not surrender to Python or some other general purpose scripting language.

Who knows more about making games than game makers? Nobody. It is a cool thing to allow other languages such as Python or Lua to be used, but some day, we think we can make a language that will become the game progamming standard. Maybe not, but it is a very cool goal.

-Jeff Tunnell GG

#5 A good way to kill a half-hour, at least, is to ask Mark what he'd change about the scripting language if he could. In fact, a good way to kill any amount of time is to just keep asking Mark what he'd change about a certain aspect of Torque if he could.

#6 I have done some decent work with Torque, including adding Python support to the engine. I currently use Torque as compiled into a standard Python extension. I don't feel that I surrendered to Python, or that it is particularly generic compared to any other language. Including C++, which Torque is ultimately written in.

Python has C/C++ API's, you can extend it in any direction you want. You can walk into your local bookstore and pick up a Python guide + reference manual. Python is absolutely free and the source code is available. There is an unbelievable amount of work being done in the Python community, which is huge. Cross platform GUI code, JIT compilers, networking libraries that support internet standards, remote object services, web servers, you name it... Python is an incredibly expressive language, it is easy for the novice to pick up... and man, oh, man... don't get me started on new style classes, generators, and the like.

Lua is similar. It is *very* popular with game developers, professional and otherwise, on PC and console. Lua is extremely powerful, has a small memory footprint, and is quite fast. It's been been in development since 1993, with multiple revisions and rewrites... the core developers are perfectionists, it's a thing of beauty... the language has coroutine support, amongst other goodies...

UnrealScript is the best "game language" I have seen, and I would still pick Python over it for many, many reasons. Not least of which, is that you can do anything it can do in Python... including latent functions. Oh, and I don't have an Unreal license... kind of a clincher aye?

Torque Script is a nice (little) scripting language (?subset of C with namespaces?) that is good at exposing Torque C++ engine internals... It can also configure the engine's datablocks... It has a remote debugger, which is very very cool... It's good for modders and people new to programming..

I believe the Garage Games decision to stick with the current stuff is the "right" one. I don't think it was ever really a question.

-J

#7 Jeff,

That sounds like a good idea. If you do write a standard scripting language and interpreter, even if it's only for GG products that'll save development time on future generation engines. I'm sure there are a lot of pieces of TGE that could be made modular (or may already be) enough to be reused again and again. TGE certainly seems like a solid framework to build off of.

Pat,

Lol! I'll try to avoid the subject! :)

Thanks for the info guys!

John.