Absence notice

[Carsten]

Dear folks,

I'll be absent from 2nd to 23rd April, having first some holidays in Singapore, then some business in Hong-Kong.

Good news is that I'll take my laptop (in fact, my brothers ) and my books with me, and continue to work at Ca3DE even during the holidays. Initial work on revising the Ca3DE Game System and introducing Map Scripting based on the Lua programming language went very very well, and I'll be happy to continue as much and as quickly as possible.

Moreover, I'll check my emails and forum posts as often as possible (roughly every second day), although I might not be able to write lengthy replies during my absence. Please be assured that all emails and posts will be read and eventually replied to, the latest when I'm back home.

[n321]

Hey quick idea if you get this post.....

when you use lua to add map scripting you should also create a simple monster spawn (like the trinity) that looks to a lua script for its purpose. So in editor you have an entity that is a monster/bot entity and then edit the entitys key in the editor and direct it to a lua script. This way monster scripts can be as simple as Q2 or as advanced as an RPG....monsters could also work as NPC's and team NPC's. The same entity can also be bots for MP......all one would have to do is edit scripts.

To me the ideal entity should have these options

::::Monster entity:::::

Model: example.md5
Script: example.lua
spawn trigger: event 1 (maybe defined in a map event lua script?)

Just an idea.......then the community could write all sorts of AI scripts and such....or at least I could for everyone to use!

[Carsten]

Dear n321,

thank you very much for your suggestion - albeit I have to admit that I don't understand what exactly you're after, I'm pretty sure that the resulting scripting system will be able to handle the features you want.

(AI is and will always be a complex subject, and I guess that C++ code will have to assist the more complex scripts for AI. If you like, please give more details / small pseudo samples about whatever you had in mind in your post. Also, I'm currently mostly concerned with making the scripting and the underlying code design work at all, implementing AI with it might require extensions that come in a second step.)

Best regards from Sentosa Island, Singapore,
Carsten

[n321]

My idea was to basically create an entity that gets all of its info from a lua script.......

Place an NPC entity in the map editor and define its lua script and have a lua script that defines everything from models to AI to animation...

might be slow but it was just an idea

[Carsten]

n321, yes, I believe that the implementation for Lua scripting that I have in mind will achieve everything that you mentioned, and will even exceed it.
I don't know if the scripting implementation will come with all the features and bell and whistles immediately with the next release (maybe it will take me another release to revise and augment everything), but I'm sure will eventually get a very good and powerful scripting system.