[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Plans for 1.12

[Dan Sugalski <dan@xxxxxxxxx>]

At 01:47 AM 6/27/00 +0200, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 26, 2000 at 01:04:11PM -0500, Tony Stuckey wrote:
> > On Mon, Jun 26, 2000 at 01:38:22PM -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> > > Most of the folks that'll use this won't really care what language it's
> > > in--they'll be using black box scripts and probably just make sure 
> that the
> > > scripting engine they need (be it perl, python, scheme, TCL, or 
> whatever)
> > > is installed.
> >
> >       Right.  Most people won't care.  The big issue with scripting
> > languages at all in commercial games is that less than 1% of your players
> > ever want to modify the game.  Very little reward for a relatively large
> > effort in game design/programming/quality assurance terms.  And there's the
> > continuing hope/myth that a well-defined and programmed game won't *need*
> > the kind of massive repetition that scripting languages address.
>
> Remember that UNIX-people are completely contrary to ProprietaryOSes-people
> on this specific point.
This doesn't matter. The audience isn't Unix people--it's 
civ-clone/simulation players. That Unix is used as the host OS for most 
games is largely irrelevant.  Angband and its variants, for example, are 
Unix-based games with scripting support of some sort (they've got bots and 
borgs and suchlike things) but you don't see very many folks writing 
scripts for it.
Script-writing is something that's generally more annoying than useful for 
most people, so I don't think you'll find too many folks doing it. Our job 
ought to be making sure the bindings are available and easily usable so 
those scripts that are written can be easily used. If that's the case I 
think you'll see reasonably heavy script usage, though not necessarily 
heavy script writing.
                                        Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@xxxxxxxxx                         have teddy bears and even
                                     teddy bears get drunk