Python and games

[Josiah Carlson]

Perhaps some of you would get a kick out of this.
- Josiah


Like XML, scripting was extremely useful as both a mod tool and an
internal development tool. If you don't have any need to expose code
and algorithms in a simple and safe way to others, you can argue that
providing a scripting language is not worth the effort. However, if you
do have that need, as we did, scripting is a no brainer, and it makes
complete sense to use a powerful, documented, cross-platform standard
such as Python.
Python, like many good technologies, soon spreads virally throughout
your development team and finds its way into all sorts of applications
and tools. In other words, Python begins to feel like a big hammer and
coding tasks look like nails.

- Mustafa Thamer, Firaxis Games (talking about Civilization IV)
Page 18, August 2005 Game Developer magazine

 

[Eric Lavigne]

Like XML, scripting was extremely useful as both a mod tool and an

internal development tool. If you don't have any need to expose code
and algorithms in a simple and safe way to others, you can argue that
providing a scripting language is not worth the effort. However, if you
do have that need, as we did, scripting is a no brainer, and it makes
complete sense to use a powerful, documented, cross-platform standard
such as Python.

The Torque Game Engine at www.garagegames.com is written in C++ and
comes with a customized scripting language, torquescript, with a c-like
syntax. Despite that, some game developers decided to add Python as
another scripting layer on top of torquescript. The modified version of
Torque is called PyTorque. I never tried PyTorque, but looking back on
my time with torquescript this sounds like a very good idea.
Torquescript was fine for convenient access to Torque features, but it
never felt as flexible as a general-purpose language like Python. I
expect that the Torque development team could have saved themselves a
lot of trouble by using Python as an extension language to begin with.