Slashdot Mirror
Game Scripting With Python
P. Staurou writes "There is very interesting article about game scripting with Python over at Sylphis3d.com. It talks about how game engines should be structured as operating systems with actors being the processes. The proposed design is based on a special version of Python called Stackless and already successfully implemented in their own Sylphis3D game engine."
... is already using stackless Python, so it's a proven, successful multiplayer online game platform. EVE has upwards of 10,000 players most of the time.
This article presents the idea relatively well, but this is NOT A NEW IDEA.
I'm not sure if Epic invented it, but I can certainly tell you that microthreading, latent functions (such as the sleep in the door example, or a playanimation method that takes game time to complete), and this general idea has been around since at least the original Unreal Engine in UnrealScript (which is now a rather mature scripting language).
http://brandonbloom.name
It didn't make the front page, but the recent article on extending games with Lua is also worth a read. My personal preference is still for Python (I love all of the libraries that it has), but Lua is good if you need some small scripting engine.
In that article, I was asked about this book, which covers Lua, Python, and Ruby for games. Despite having all of the "right languages," the book is awful. For people wanting to extend games with python, I suggest Game Programming with Python. This book is a wonderful overview.
As for the language, we used Python in Unity http://www.otee.dk/ for the initial preproduction of GooBall. It was soooo slow. After that we switched to Mono. CPU usage in the scripting logic went for >40% to app. 5%... If you like the Python syntax, you can always include boo http://boo.codehaus.org/ which mimics Python very closely, but uses type inference to get type safety automatically. On another note: the article states that Unreal does not use microthreads. That is not correct.
The point of using Stackless Python (as opposed to ordinary Python) is that it provides a particularly good system for handling multiple threads and communcation for threads via tasklets and channels. If your game engine works by creating actors as threads then using a scripting language that has a simple to use, efficient, and platform independent threading model is likely of great importance, and Stackless Python offers that.
If you're generally interested in better threading models, and being able to think and reason about threads and their interactions more easily then you really ought to check out CSP. Multithreading is actually easy if you do it right - it's just that most languages don't.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
See the Unreal Tournament Community Bonus Pack, and the SuperStorm fan-made patch for Earth 2160. Both hosted on official download sites. The UT2003 community pack was actually included on the UT2004 DVD.
These are just the two examples I've played today...
Slashdot - Mutual Assured Discussion