[PhyrFox]

Scripting is as simple or as complex as you want it to be. A simple scripting engine could be made up in a few minutes, others could require days, weeks, or months. The more powerful a language is, the more difficult it is to implement it. Then again, sometimes it's easier to *not* reinvent the wheel. Sphere uses Mozilla's JavaScript engine directly, with minor builtin additions to support custom objects required by the engine itself.

Unfortunately, Sphere seems to run incredibly slow, probably due to the fact that it supports infinite layers, every popular music, sound, and graphics format known, and is running on an interpreted (versus compiled) scripting language... It's unbearable on even a 450mhz system.

On the other hand, OHR RPG CE has it's own language. Although it's not the best language out there, it's small, compact, and perfectly tailored to the engine in question. The engine is simple and runs on even a low-end system with a lot of speed. It's just not highly portable.

If you decide to write your own scripting language, I'd be willing to help out a bit with ideas and such. I'm not much into being able to integrate other languages into my own programs; it's not something I've really looked into. I find often that reinventing the proverbial wheel often leads to a "lighter wheel that turns faster."

~= PhyrFox =~

[Mandrake]

[janus]

Sphere is slow because it's over 6 years old, does rendering in pure software by default using code that isn't very optimized, and because you have a really old computer. :)

(You may also wish to note that OHRRPGCE does not have almost any of the multimedia features Sphere has, which makes the comparison a bit inadequate)

[DanKirby]

Right now, I'm working on the menu systems, anyway. I want more functionality in the engine before figuring out how to script it.

[PhyrFox]

[Hajo]

[tsb]

Sphere's slowness is entirely because of its software renderer. The speed problems tend to disappear when you use the sphere_gl driver.

On the other hand, VERGE v3 uses a home-cooked, compiled scripting language, not at all unlike OHRRPGE. This language runs about half as fast as Python and isn't anywhere close to the same level of expressivity. (FYI, Python isn't a terrifically efficient language from an execution standpoint: Java runs rings around it)

Verge as a whole runs at a healthy clip because it doesn't use alpha channels for anything by default, not because its scripting language was implemented from scratch. :)

[Mandrake]

[DanKirby]

I'm more than likely going back to Lua at this point. I would've used it anyway for scripting the battle engine, since I needed a more developed system for the calculations and stuff.
The only problem I have is unloading the old script set when the new one is loaded. (when the map changes) Not quite sure how to do that.

I just need to work on the main menu console, and then I can get to work on the scripting system.

[Hajo]

You can instantiate several Lua interpreters in yopur program each one with it's own heap an stack. Unloading = destroy the old one, loading = instantiate a new one ?

[DanKirby]

I've considered that. There are a few issues, though.
I can't have the map loading routine do that automatically, if I'm in the middle of a cutscene script or something. I'd have to do something similar to what I did with ToL: save the name of the current map before entering the script area, then check it after, and load a new script if the map is different.

Anyway, I'm working on the main menu console right now. It looks kind of ugly, with everything printed in Arial font. I might have a picture up here when I'm done with it.

[DanKirby]

Don't have a picture, but I've finished the menu system. Except for the Game Options section, but that's because I don't have any options to set...

So now, I can focus on the engine<->scripting system interface before I start on designing the battle system (ick).

[DanKirby]

Things are going well with the scripting engine except for one thing. I can't get my engine to call a Lua script function other than the main.

I try to push the function onto the top of the stack every way I can. But it keeps saying it's a nil value. I can call the function from within the script just fine, but from the engine it just doesn't seem to work.[/code]

[DanKirby]

Never mind...I seem to have gotten it. I had to run lua_call just when the script was loaded...to register the functions in the global table, I guess.

Anyway, I can continue testing my script functions now.

[Bjorn]

Yeah that's how it works. :-)