A new game engine

I am working on a new game engine as I am not happy with the ones currently out there. I am writing the engine in C#/Mono so it will easily port to numerous platforms. The question I have for the community is if you had a choice of writing your games using scripts what scripting language would you prefer to use?

Lua?
C#?
Something else?

Eventually I will create an IDE similar to that of ADRIFT that will generate the scripts but you will still have the ability to hand jam/edit the scripts as needed. Which is one of the major reason I am creating this.

My next question is, is there anything that you would like to see addressed in a new IF game engine?

Regards,
Michael

What are your own goals? What kind or things (or lack or them) in existing systems made you start this project?

Three major motivating factors for me are:

  1. I like the idea of and IDE like ADRIFT but there were things in the past I wanted to do that were overly hard or impossible in ADRIFT. Thus, an IDE like ADRIFT is too limited but very useful if you have access to the source.

  2. There is nothing wrong with TADs and I considered writing an IDE for it similar to what ADRIFT has. The TADS workbench is nothing more than a text edit similar to Visual Studio. I’d rather have something closer to what ADRIFT has to offer 90% of the time and only 10% of the time should we dive down into the actual code. ‘I F’ should not be about coding but writing stories/games. Why I am not writing an IDE for TADS is that I feel that I would have to learn the TADS language to a much greater degree than I already know it and I’d rather stick to languages I will be able to use in the business world when I graduate and get out of the military in 2 years.

  3. Finally, this is just something I have wanted to do for a long time, a challenge for me. Once I get further along I plan to release it as open source. I feel that it would be a benefit to the IF community to have a modern engine written (IMO) in a more accessible language open to the community as a whole to contribute to.

Regards,
Michael

Um, quest.codeplex.com

natural language maybe? :slight_smile:

Michael,

Trying to build a new game engine is a time-honored tradition within the IF community. There are a great many things one can learn from such an endeavor. The primary point you may take from this thread is that your reason #3 is the most important. You are not building this for us at this time. You are building it for you. So if that’s the case, you choose all of the technical aspects, the editor, the scripting language. You are relieved of any need to cater to anyone else. I too have a side-project, long in mothballs, to build a “simple” (ha ha ha) game engine in VB.NET (because I’m crazy). The primary force behind doing something like this is because it’s a challenge, it’s kind of fun, and it will break your brain on many occasions.

So set aside any questions about what we would want. I would focus on the technical details and ask those questions. Things like:

How do you marry the parser engine to a world model where the idea of a noun can be scripted, understood, stored, retrieved, and analyzed?

That’s not a simple question…trust me.

Have fun!

David C.
www.textfyre.com

So how have I never heard of Quest? I’ve been playing IF since the mid 80’s… I like where Quest has gone. Will have to download the source latter and see if I cant squish some bugs to get a feel for the code.

Hurrah - always happy for more contributors to come on board :slight_smile: