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Quasar

Aeon Branch Development Thread

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This'll be the development thread for discussion of upcoming progress on aeon-branch, which is the effort to add, finally, a stable and powerful form of scripting to the Eternity Engine, courtesy of the SpiderMonkey ECMAScript virtual machine.

Current goals for Aeon include the following:

  • "Code Anywhere" - Anywhere a string can go, Aeon can go. This will include inside EDF (using heredocs), where it can be used to define action functions inline with the objects that call them (similar to QuakeC or Duke3D CON), and inside properties of UDMF objects.
  • Object-oriented prototype hierarchy that will present a clean structured interface to the internals of the DOOM engine. This will include the ability to refer to actors via ECMAScript references and not only by numeric TIDs.
  • Backwards "API" compatibility with ACS via a global ACS interpreter object that offers access to all ACS functions as well as the ability to start/stop ACS scripts.
  • High-level interfaces to systems like the HUD (similar to that previously available in Small) which save the scripter from essentially writing their own game engine just to put graphics on screen.
  • Canvas objects for dynamic graphics and programmatic textures.
This is just a very small subset of what I hope to accomplish. I cannot say how long it will take to achieve all of these things, probably a good while. Part of it will depend on how fast we can develop the basic object model, and also on whether or not we get any help making this thing build on Linux-alikes.

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This really does sound incredible. Even relatively early on in its development, before most of the stuff you're thinking of is implemented, I can see this already being a huge deal. Can't wait to see what kinds of magic can be made :)

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Awesome. An overused word, I know, but in this case I really mean it. Just imagine all the great things one could do with it ...

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Quasar said:

and inside properties of UDMF objects.

This means scripts embedded right in the map? No more need for a separate lump... But will you have to deviate from the UDMF standard and support HEREDOCs there?

EDIT: whatever. UDMF doesn't limit itself to TEXTMAP, it can have other lumps too...

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printz said:

This means scripts embedded right in the map? No more need for a separate lump... But will you have to deviate from the UDMF standard and support HEREDOCs there?

EDIT: whatever. UDMF doesn't limit itself to TEXTMAP, it can have other lumps too...



You can store scripts as strings with '\n' for line breaks. When this topic came up we had a lengthy discussion about adding Heredoc syntax but aside from Quasar nobody wanted it since the same result can already be achieved by other means.

Since handling of such data is the editor's business this should be of no consequence to the mapper.

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