Map format and ACS

Wouldn't it be a good idea to make Eternity's scripting language (be it small or something else) at least as capable as Hexen's ACS? I'm sorry I don't have the docs ready to give proof, but I'm quite sure there are effects that can't be achieved simply by small, such as monsters spawning items on death or functions that change wall textures or light levels. There are many effects quickly achievable through simple ACS scripting, that in Eternity require me to use an almost convoluted small/EDF/conveyor-script communication.

For example, for a light fading effect, instead of merely telling the game to "change lightness, wait, change lightness, wait...", I had to activate a steadily slow conveyor belt that had the player walk through a series of light-to-neighbour linedefs, that if done wrong would malfunction and make it pitch-black. There's no light-changing function in small, that's why. :) And it was the death of a Spiderdemon that triggered the conveyor, among other things. Instead of possibly calling the script from a suitable EXTRADATA entry, I had to edit by EDF a dying frame of the boss to do it.

In order to keep original Doom behaviour, maybe the death specials could be connected to the Fall or Scream codepointers, or to happen a few seconds after the kill count has been incremented?

Come to think of it, when Eternity supports Hexen, will it actually be compatible with that map format? Or that will happen only with the main Hexen.wad, but the PWADs will always require Doom-format/Extradata? At least, knowing that Hexen is on the slate of things to-do, I'm sure the hub support will be redone (if it's not redone already and I'm unaware).

Yes, I am mapping something for this port, but I'm progressing slowly, as usual, but I don't delete what I put.

printz said:

There's no light-changing function in small, that's why. :)

Yes there is. I know this because the only Small script I've ever written was to open some polyobject doors and fade up the light behind them. I have no idea where the script went (I looked, but it's long gone), but I do know that such a function definitely exists :P

And Eternity actually already supports loading maps in Hexen format, but it's not of much use at the moment because very few of the line/sector specials do anything yet. UDMF will render the Hexen map format effectively useless for everything except playing Hexen, anyway, though.

The Light_ specials from Hexen are implemented, but have not been documented yet due to the fact they're new since the last release.