Scheme ?

[Dowland]

Hello,

How many of you know what Scheme is ... and of those, how many think it would be suited for adventure game scripting ?

Just a thought! 

J.

[Squinky]

Hi

I don't know what you are talking about

I am sorry.

S.

[Nikolas]

Hi!

My neither!

N.

[Kal-El]

Yo! yo! yo!

Me neither, sorry.

K.

[IM NOT TEH SPAM]

Hello,

Yea, you should probably tell us a little bit about Scheme before someone else says something like the last 3 posts.

KN.

[Theme]

What is Scheme?

o/

E.

[Eggie]

I think Scheme us the best thing ever.
But it's more suited to making me roast beef sandwiches than it is for creating adventure games.

EHCB.

[Fuzzpilz]

Personally I'd rather eat tacks than use Scheme (Wikipedia article, for those who have no idea what it is) for anything at all, but if you're good at it yourself and are just interested in using it for your own game, then why not? You'd probably have to do quite a lot of work getting some interpreter to interface well with the rest of your engine, mind - I'm not sure if there are any available that are particularly suitable for games; and for some common tasks (especially cut scenes and the like) you'd probably either have to introduce imperative-ish impurities, which may get you assassinated by ninjas in the employ of the Knights of the Lambda Calculus, or somehow combine it with something more typical.

If you're hoping to attract The General Public to your engine, however, I'd definitely advise against using Scheme. I think the functional programming paradigm is probably a lot harder to understand for most people than, say, the usual imperative/procedural/OO approaches.

[edmundito]

(define AGS 2.71)

... I know what you're talking about.

Some professionals tried to used Lisp to develop their games once, but the problem was that it is pretty confusing to read as a scripting language. I think most gaming people use the brazilian language Lua which has a lot of the cool things you can do with Lisp/Scheme, and someone was working on an adventure game engine with it.

[HeirOfNorton]

I think most gaming people use the brazilian language Lua ... and someone was working on an adventure game engine with it.

You mean LucasArts?   
They used Lua as the scripting language for Grim Fandango (I think Monkey Island 4, as well, but I'm not sure about that one.)
I've given a (rather cursory) glance at the various scripting languages around, and from what I've seen, Lua is pretty much considered the most suitable. GameMonkey is also pretty high up the list (similar features to Lua, with a C-style syntax and grammar). Python and Ruby come as distand third and fourth, and I think AngelScript was the only other one even in the running.
Forget about Perl. Different intentions altogether.
Any of these would be far better, I think, than Scheme.

Just my (likely poorly informed) opinion...

HoN

P.S. Bear in mind that all of these are very GENERAL languages, and none of them will already have all the features you need, or even necesarrily MOST of the features you need. If I'm not mistaken, that's the main reason C.J. wrote his own script from scratch for AGS.

Edit: Added links to the above languages.
Also, I forgot about Tcl. Not used very much any more for games, but it has been before. I personally could never make heads or tails of it.

[edmundito]

lucasarts is known for using it... dunno if they do anymore, because the grim team ended up at double fine, and they use Lua. Tell Tale Games also uses it, too...

Aside from LEC-Related, Blizzard also uses it. In World of Warcraft, you can program custom interface mods with Lua. There are also other games like Far Cry, Homeworld 2, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Dorks Nights, and perhaps those studios who made those games still use it.

I just found this PDF'ed presentation on grim fandango about Lua, too: http://www.lua.org/wshop05/Mogul.pdf. It has some interesting bit of trivia like the name for the "acwin" of SCUMM is SPUTM.

What I was really looking for was the Mad adventure game engine which uses Lua. I think there was another one, though.

[SSH]

Well, as an emacs-lisp hacker myself, I'd love to be able to do some of the list manipulation stuff, etc of lisp (and hence scheme) in AGS. On the other hand, I don't want to type lots of brackets. 

But a functional (as opposed to imperative) language based engine would be great! It would suit a callback-based system well.

My preference would be for an ML-based system, though, 'cause then I'd be the only one who colud use it Well, actually, .NET F# is ultimately baed on ML.