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Curious fantasy and hypothesis


Bloodknight

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Maybe a good angle would be to have an article or two talking about why Torquescript is great and what separates it from other choices such as LUA, C#, etc? In my (admittedly limited) experience, people tend to be way more amenable to learning a new language, tool, etc if there is good justification and clear advantages for doing so.

 

Did Godot's scripting language put people off? Not at all. Godot got c# and python scripting well after it boomed in popularity.

From my time keeping an eye on Godot, there was initially a lot of hostility about GDScript - a lot of newcomers were puzzled as to why a modern engine focused on lightweight and mobile would support a funky interpreted language with high overhead, especially one for which they had to learn new syntax. But, as it turns out, there's not just comprehensive documentation on Godot's site, but GDScript's introductory page (here: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/getting_started/scripting/gdscript/gdscript_basics.html ) lays out why they chose to implement it, as well as key advantages it offers. I wouldn't discount how important having that sort of thing is in getting people on board with using Torquescript.

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Furthermore, it is statically typed. Which is an absolute must for me, I like to put a lot of functionality into scripts, so I don't want to deal with shitty dynamic typed shittyness.


Before we look into making any language official, I think it should prove itself as a stable and broadly popular choice in a standalone packaging before we begin making it official.

Atm, the C# implementation should just be seen as a "proposal" or PoC solution.

 

Python and TS lived side by side as a resource for years. Rolling in those augmentations to let folks make that happen with whatever language they wish is laudable.


Simply to state the counter-perception, to my mind at least (and again, personal opinion) it's never made a great deal of sense to use a precision source and precision script pairing. While the tooling is surely more plentiful for them, if you've access to both i far prefer the status quo of precision source side and shall we say.. 'fuzzy' design script side for prototypical iteration, simple and one off class-modding. So I would urge that we maintain the 'why not both' approach.


Edit, Ironically, that godot link under history lists several of the bulletpoints we leverage too, such as syntax sugar for %foo="1 2 3"; %foo.y==2; and oneliner macros for leveraging class elements and methods as a couple quick readthrough examples.

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You're not wrong, Phantom_Limbs. In fact, the point I was making was that people disliked gdscript, and yet the engine still became popular before the other languages were implemented. The proposal you made is one I've been contemplating, as well, and inspired by, it seems, the same Godot article.


It may be unnecessary for me to say I agree with Azaezel's points, but I'll do it anyway.

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I'm not an expert programmer, but from what I have learned over the years is that the scripting language does not matter that much, since it is usually not performance relevant stuff and that the performance relevant stuff should be in C++ anyway, which beats any scripting language in performance. Others even use things like blueprints aka visual scripting and they are the worst regarding performance, but it does not matter since it is not that performance relevant and modern computers are fast enough.


It is mostly just a belief war and most people fighting it have no clue about anything, if you want to make a point, make a demo and measure the results, so you can present a definitive proof, everything else is probably not constructive.


I saw implementations of Lua in Torque and then you had a scripting folder with Torquescript and one with Lua, making everything even worse. I also saw games written totally in Lua and they had horrible performance because of that. To make it short, I have not seen any evidence yet that would convince me that another scripting language would make sense to use. Sure the engine is open source, so you can do what you want, but please do not break the old stuff, there are people using it, that's my biggest concern.

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Im not so sure what this thread was meant to be but it seems to have turned to a language discussion.

I put in my words of limited wisdom here.

The main argument in favor of TS seems to be "its not all that bad", which is somewhat true.

Its comparable to most other languages, lua particularly, except the one thing where it kicked me in the crotch was lack of proper arrays.


I would argue that the best move is to use lua instead of torquescript, i have a few points in favor of that.

  • Ts is already so similar to lua syntactically it would make conversion of ts to lua pretty easy and the codebase is not so huge that it would take a tremendous amount of time.
  • I dont know much on benchmarking but the game spring1944 uses lua very extensively and manages to deliver good performance.
  • Unlike C# its not a heavy language, in my experience of game design more is less, even openra which is written in C# uses lua as scripting lang.
  • Its a widely used language with lots of libraries nowdays.
  • The lack of proper arrays in ts is just a big no go for me, i know there are special objects for that, but thats a bad hack that just will go wrong lots of times.
  • The explicit differentiation of comparsion operators for strings and numbers is a hit waiting to happen, atleast lua gives you an error when you try something like that.
  • Ts probably wont be changed in the future i guess, but its still something that the t3d devs have to maintain inhouse.
  • Some have argued that if someone cant be bothered to learn ts then they wont care much bout the engine, but some in house built scripting language is always a slight downer compare to using something time proven.
  • Godot was cited as a engine using successfully using its own language, but i use gd script and its always a slightly bitter experience regardless of how easy it is to use
  • Its a cheap argument to make, but get with the times, ts wont get attractive no matter how many games are made in it, it will always remain some kind of obscure outcast.

I suppose the main problem with those arguments are there are neither any real pros or cons in regards to keep using ts, it boils down to a matter of experience and preference for most of us.

Ts may have been a good thing back in the day given the age of the engine and it still does a good job, but my view of things is that lua does the same job but better.

Even tough i can see why some would like a more heavy language like c#, doing the game code in a lightweight language is in my experience the way to go.

I suppose regardless of how this goes theres always gonna be a dislike of .

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Hi,....I have not written a long time here :D ....but I still have Torque engine on my harddisk and occasionally very little I use it....I have been using Godot engine for over two years now and as somebody said this could be a good example.

.....why did I choose a Godot engine?....here I have to mention that I am mainly an artist not a programmer and yet after about a year I can write in GDscript mostly my own scripts....so simply that great scripting language is....that's one of the reasons...next good user-friendly and clear UI.....great scene/node system....write script - run game instantly....no third-party shits...easy "with just one click" game release for many platforms.....great Linux support...when you're done with Windows you're sure it works great on the Linux distr.

.....and many other reasons why I chose this engine.....and not as someone wrote here about mobile phones and shit cryptocurrencies and similar craps ;)...ask people on the Godot forums and you mainly hear the same things.

....So Torque engine way?....upgrade/modernize TSscript...so easy write script directly in editor as in Godot engine.....artist friendly TSscript with many examples...maybe visual scripting too.

.....user-friendly UI for editor.

.....easy "one click" releases for platforms.

....new modern project manager editor

.....I think it can be a good start for the Torque engine to have more users and bigger community.....because I think Torque engine has many to offer...just needs a little to modernize.....Torque engine is also MIT licensed and has a great chance to become a very popular engine as well....you should use it.


Edit: l read now Bloodknight's features/wishes list post and yeah! If done this so it will be more than great.

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that thread is pretty dated, in fact, would have been forgotten had not practicing necroed it to the top :p


maybe worth reworking it into a new thread since half of it is either done or done somewhere

 

Yes...I also noticed that it is not up to date :)...I wish the Torque engine to make the big changes right to implement as well as more users because the Torque engine is also a great engine but now I'm just creating projects faster and much easier in the Godot engine.

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Yes...I also noticed that it is not up to date :)...I wish the Torque engine to make the big changes right to implement as well as more users because the Torque engine is also a great engine but now I'm just creating projects faster and much easier in the Godot engine.

 

But can you make an MMO with Godot?

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But can you make an MMO with Godot?

 

I think 2d mmo yes but 3d not....Godot is still not good in larger 3d scenes.... performance is

really bad....missing LOD and Occlusion culling....although it has a pbr but shader rendering or processing is probably slow.......Godot version 4.0 could change it but it will be in a year and a half.

Torque engine has a much better performance and now I'm working on one project in this great engine.....I love both engines :)

......what I really love about the Torque engine is landscaping and weather and particles ...because I do mainly exploration adventure puzzle and experimental art and weird walking games....so I need great

landscapes and buildings.

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I just don't understand why people advertise to use currently non-functioning engines to develop games with. I tried to use some other incomplete or not tested in production engines to make a game with and I realized you will very likely hit a wall at some point where you cannot finish your project. Torque may be old, outdated, uncomfortable etc, but it has been proven to work in the past with many finished games and a finished game with a little less quality is better than an unfinished game with a little better quality.

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