It's all in your head, Part 9

[Xocrates]

SimCity 4,

Arrrggghhhh!!! Mock me not! I bought it today and one of the Cds was scratched

I hope the store will replace it.

[Mas Tnega]

Man, who didn't play Simtower? There's some elevator simulator if ever you needed some!

Starting to feel lonely...

[KingAl]

My word, it's a 3d version of SimTower!

Hehe, that's particularly pertinent - SimTower started out as elevator simulating technology.

Man, who didn't play Simtower? There's some elevator simulator if ever you needed some!

I remember reading somewhere that SimTower started as a lift simulator

Linky.
The guy's pretty harsh on SimTower, though. That was an awesome game And I didn't even have the manual <.<

[Pox]

Wow, this is looking like one of the deepest simulators ever... and fully scripted would be awesome, I could see a huge modding community jumping up around this.

As to the language, I don't have much experience in games myself, but I wouid recommend LUA over Python if only for the reason it's designed as a game scripting language. Also of course because Python syntax blows.

[barabanus]

I'm working with Lua for 4 years and I can surely say: it rocks. It has such an elegance in syntax that you can describe all known data structures as tables! Just think about it: no enums, no lists, no classes - just a table to describe all these structures.

[Rkiver]

The level of detail for just the lift system is unreal. The more and more you show us Chris the more and more I wonder what exactly this is going to end up as, I mean if one follows it so far to it's logical conclusion it could be used for real time strategies, FPS autogenerated levels, city management ala Sim City, and who knows what else.

The question I would love to know, is what exactly is Subversion going to be? Yes Darwinia changed during development from one thing to another, but at this point what is Subversion in IV's eyes?

I await the next blog with baited breath.

[microchip08]

Man, who didn't play Simtower? There's some elevator simulator if ever you needed some!

Starting to feel lonely...

Well, I'm off to download the abandonware.

So I'm with you (but not for long)...

[martin]

The level of detail for just the lift system is unreal. The more and more you show us Chris the more and more I wonder what exactly this is going to end up as, I mean if one follows it so far to it's logical conclusion it could be used for real time strategies, FPS autogenerated levels, city management ala Sim City, and who knows what else.

The question I would love to know, is what exactly is Subversion going to be? Yes Darwinia changed during development from one thing to another, but at this point what is Subversion in IV's eyes?

I await the next blog with baited breath.

yeah, it's certainly quite exciting when I start wondering just how in depth this is going to be, and what scale it's going to be on! I mean you can potentially procedurally generate an entire universe like spore, and this kind of technology can be used for anything as you say.
And I certinaly hope the next blog post tells us more about the game itself, but I doubt it

[microchip08]

Man, who didn't play Simtower? There's some elevator simulator if ever you needed some!

Starting to feel lonely...

Well, I'm off to download the abandonware.

So I'm with you (but not for long)...

Noooo! It won't install!

[OrR]

Terrorism training simulator? Mwahahahaha....

[Superpig]

Yeah, SimTower started as an elevator simulator. The guy behind it, Yoot Saito, has actually released a sequel, which I believe is available somewhere on the web (look for 'Yoot Tower').

As far as scripting languages go: Don't forget that EVE uses stackless Python rather than regular Python, and also, have you looked at a functional language like Lisp or Haskell? The advantages of higher-level, functional languages are that you get away from "implementing" behaviour and get closer to describing it, leaving the actual way that things get calculated up to the runtime. A pure functional language like Haskell, for example, can be executed in a highly parallel way, can be extensively automatically optimized, and is much easier to predict than a more imperative language.

Tim Sweeney did a presentation on "the next mainstream programming language" - he has his share of problems with Haskell, but many of the ideas he proposes are present in the language. It's worth considering. I don't know how easily embeddable it is, mind.

[ewanm]

ewanm goes and starts to write an elevator simulator in python (or ruby), maybe it will evolve into an opensource simtower clone...

[mcnicholls]

As far as scripting languages go: Don't forget that EVE uses stackless Python rather than regular Python.

I had breifly forgotten about stackless, but i would think it is perfect for this kind of project. Coroutines would allow you to create a lot of game objects that all run concurrently.

Although i was reading a little about lua and it seems it supports coroutines as well. Is that true?

Not sure if there is much or any support for coroutines in ruby.

Rereading this blog entry and reading other peoples posts has made me appreciate just how complex the simulation could be. Can't wait to hear more about it.

[__ROB_D__]

If Your still looking at different Scripting option, have you seen AngleScript? (http://www.angelcode.com/angelscript/) or if you've developed a liking for lua, maybe take a look at GameMonkey (http://www.somedude.net/gamemonkey/).... I look at both Lua and Pyton and want happy with either, but that just my opinion!

It's looking good,
Rob

[stiill]

In my experiments Lua has proved to be much simpler to embed in C++, however it is much more down to the wire – Lua requires the C++ programmer to directly manipulate a shared stack to communicate with your scripts, which is analogous to programming while sitting on a pile of volatile explosives while spiders crawl over your body.

After you've integrated Lua with your engine and defined some helpful C++ macros to facilitate inter-language communication, it's smooth sailing as far as using the language. We had some issues with Lua's memory usage on Psychonauts, but we rarely ran into crashes, memory corruption, etc. related to C++/Lua integration. (And we used a ridiculous amount of script.) I know Dave Dixon wasn't totally sold on using Lua (or any scripting language) again, perhaps due to a last-minute push to actually "fit in memory" or some other ridiculous requirement. He (or Paul Du Bois, or both... I forget) spoke about it at a GDC roundtable in 2004, which you may be able to dig up notes for. As you noted already, though, that's an eternity in Lua years.