Enhancing scripts

In my last post, I mentioned a problem I had where I had to specify the 'source texture' when changing a tile's texture from a script. My proposed solution was to move scripts out of the 'TileStack' level and into the 'Tile' level. I went ahead and did this, worked great!

So now, the 'change texture' and 'change animation' script methods are simpler and easier to use.

Having all of this game logic entirely contained in scripts inspired me to move any game-specific logic out of the engine (C#) and into scripts (Lua). So, I migrated the player movement and sword-swinging script (there's barely any code there yet) to a script. There's nothing to show for this, since it's just moving code from one place to another, but it does allow me to change player behavior more dynamically at runtime without rebuilding the code.

Okay, now for the fun stuff. I added a few major things to the scripting infrastructure:

• A 'CreateEntity' method on the Section interface. This does exactly what you'd expect; it creates an entity based on a number of parameters, such as position, rotation, texture, etc.
• Added a 'Motion Controller' component to entities. The first implementation of this is a very simple linear motion controller (you give it a velocity vector and the entity will move in that direction every update).
• Added a ScriptInterface so that scripts can manipulate their own lifetime and other behaviors. This has a few methods, notably the ability to set a 'delay until the script can run again' and 'the number of times a script can run before it is destroyed.'

The following video demonstrates these new features:

Next up: I'll code another event trigger representing 'playerDamage.' That is, the event will be triggered when the player slashes their sword at something.