SN dev language

Racer1

Although Unity is based on .net/mono framework, there are a number of language options for development (C#, UnityScript-JS, Boo-Python). What language are you trying to use for SN development?
Related to this, are you planning on making most of the game tightly coupled with the engine, or do you intend to have a generic scripting interface to allow simpler (future) modding?

coolitic

I think they said modding isn't priority for a while, but later they would look into it.

SteveRock

we're mainly using C#.

the terrain test was kind of an experiment in modding, and I think it was pretty successful technically. definitely learned some important things. chances are good that we'll support plugins for the game in some form. no idea about how the API might look...

coolitic

At least they aren't going full LUA like they did with NS2.

SteveRock

While there were performance issues with NS2's use of Lua, please don't pin that on Lua Lua can be quite fast if you design the API to take advantage of LuaJIT from the get go. There were many things we were doing that were not JIT-friendly, and thus we didn't really get many performance benefits from it. We did make attempts to address this later, with some help from fsfod, but there were major changes that would have been required in order to fully utilize JIT's features.

And actually, that's one thing I learned from the doing the terrain test: how to NOT design the mod API. If you have too many back and forths between the plugin and the game, you have to sacrifice certain sandboxing features in order to get performance. So, while I'm not sure if we will sand box mods, it's certainly good to know this going forward.

Racer1

So are you planning on statically linking most of the libraries in, to prevent that "back and forth" you described? I liked the idea in the terrain test that (user) modified libraries could be substituted in order to change certain aspects of the game.