6/24/99

Hello Everyone, Today the update duty has been given to me. My name is Jake Devore and I am one of the three scriptors working on the Planescape: Torment project. Where should I begin? The project is moving at such a rapid rate now... I will go ahead and explain what a scriptor does on a game title. The major obligation is to write the AI scripts that give creatures the ability to react to their surroundings. Basically we take what the designers would like the behavior of a creature to be and write code that will make the creature behave in this manner. The scripting language is unique to the engine. The Infinity engine's code looks a lot like basic, but not as flexible. There are only if-then statements. This can be frustrating at times but is also good in others. If the situation calls for some complex scripts then the language is very hard to work with. For most tasks, though, the simple if-then approach works well because you can probably type up a script in less than five minutes. Another thing about the Infinity engine scripting language is there are no macros and no user defined functions that can be called. This means that there is a lot of cut'n'pasting going on. All-in-all the engine hasn't been that difficult to work with. After the script is written we need to compile it. The compiling process doesn't take too long, but it depends on the length of the source for the script. What the compiling process does is take the script that was written and translates it into code that the engine understands. The compiling process helps to make the scripts smaller and run faster. Once you have a compiled script it needs to be added to the resource editor. The resource editor keeps tabs on which files a resource is in. All the files are in big .tar files called .bifs. The resource editor allows the engine to not have to look through all the .bifs until it finds what it needs. Once it is in the resource editor the scriptor can then test it. We will usually do a quick test and make sure everything looks like it's doing what needs to be done. We might attack something or look for something complex that we scripted and make sure it's working. Once we are confident that it's working we will usually check all the files into our version control system. Once it's in there, if there are any problems we just check out the files and fix them and then check them back in. The next day after the nightly build runs the game will be updated. That's pretty much what the scriptors do. We will do these for each individual area in the game. I hope this was informative to all of you. I am sure most of you who got this far wished they would have stopped sooner. Sincerely, Jake Devore, esquire

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