Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

1) Is there a substantial difference between the existing concept of modding and what you're saying here? I think so, but I want to check to ensure I understand. Could you provide some "No Man's Sky" pseudocode to indicate what you'd want the script to do?

2) The goal of a game designer is to create fun experiences that you actually want to do. If game designers announce they're including scripting for the purpose of automating repetitive tasks, it would probably feel embarrassing to them because any boring and repetitive parts of their games should feel like kind of a personal failure on them.

3) I'm not a full-time professional game developer, but I'd imagine that trying to implement some kind of highly polished scripting that's user-accessible represents a significant additional effort in many cases for very marginal financial benefits. It's not just building this feature that would be required, but you'd be introducing a potential new security/stability risk that would need to be extensively checked, as well as having a big system that needs to be documented and supported for users.

To point 3), it's not that difficult. Even in this space, you don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel: there are quite a few embeddable languages to choose from. Lua, microPython, GNU Guile, Janet, and plenty of others. It is fairly trivial to implement one of these, and it is up to the one implementing what capabilities should be exposed to the scripting language. It's not hard to do this in a safe way, i.e. to only allow the scripting language to control game logic, and not allow it to talk to the operating system.

Would user scripting necessarily even require access to an embedded language, or would simply choosing an architecture for your game like using a message bus and allowing users some mechanism to send in messages be enough?

That said, I still think that this kind of feature is a non-trivial amount of extra work to polish up enough even for advanced users.

Mods aren't part of the core gameplay.

Also, you don't want to make it easy for gamers to use other people's code.

Rather, you want gamers to write their own code.

That is exactly how it used to be. Mods _were_ part of the core gameplay. In fact they completely defined all the gameplay and the UI. See quake C, UnrealScript, along with a few others from that era. Counter strike was a mod. So was team fortress.

That era is gone. Devs want more control now and most games have elaborate cash-shop business models. They don't want the gameplay to be modifiable.

Just thinking out loud....but making mods is already an incredibly niche thing. I'm not sure how anybody would learn actual game scripting without being able to easily share lots of code.

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