what about the future?

[DrPraetorious]

The dominions codebase is really neat in a lot of respects - but it also shows it's age. I don't have access to the source code, but just from diving into the built-in tables you can see the accumulated cruft of ages, and a lot of things are hard-coded or messy hacks which will cause accumulated headaches down the line if they try to keep working on it.

That said, it is amazing how extensible and stable it is (and how small a footprint it has, which is really a hallmark of an earlier era), but I can see why they wouldn't want to add true scripting support - either for user-modded events, user-modded maps/scenarios, or user-modded spells.

[lch]

Johan really comes from an earlier era, and it shows in the code, though I have to emphasize that I admire him for actually coding a whole game on his own. You'd weep when I tell you the specifications about the file format for the sprites, and why they are saved in the way they are. The game still is a derivative of an Atari Falcon ST game.

I'm more interested in what this new game that they apparently are working on will look like instead of having unreasonable expectations of big changes like a scripting engine to this one, which already has been asked for over and over again since forever. The refactoring this would require is pretty much insurmountable.

[Grand Stone]

So nobody know anything about the 'new' project? Nothing?

Man, Im currius

[Wrana]

Originally Posted by lch

You'd weep when I tell you the specifications about the file format for the sprites, and why they are saved in the way they are. The game still is a derivative of an Atari Falcon ST game.

I cannot guarantee weeping as I am not a programmer, but could you tell it? I like "programming archeology", as Vinge named it.

[Corwin]

Originally Posted by DrPraetorious

The dominions codebase is really neat in a lot of respects - but it also shows it's age. I don't have access to the source code, but just from diving into the built-in tables you can see the accumulated cruft of ages, and a lot of things are hard-coded or messy hacks which will cause accumulated headaches down the line if they try to keep working on it.

That said, it is amazing how extensible and stable it is (and how small a footprint it has, which is really a hallmark of an earlier era), but I can see why they wouldn't want to add true scripting support - either for user-modded events, user-modded maps/scenarios, or user-modded spells.

I agree with what DrPraetorious said. Besides even if you would have an access to script language for the world building, events, et cetera, should you try to create really interesting campaign, I strongly suspect that severe limitations of AI would came forth with vengeance. You would likely require sophisticated dev-built tools to mod AI behavior, something that may be very difficult to retrofit into old clunky Dom3 source code. That's entirely different can of worms, especially for a game with such a complex ruleset as Dom3.


to be able to create really good compaigns,

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally Posted by Corwin

That's entirely different can of worms, especially for a game with such a complex ruleset as Dom3.

BINGO.
Early on I told people that if they wanted to come up with some AI changes they would be looked at. I provided clips of the debug code around ai actions and invited them to come up with some pseudo code. Some of the threads are still probably around. But anyone that tried found out that even the simplest complaint by the players tended to have a dozen IF this or IF that tied to it.