I have no current plans for using a scripting engine.  At this point I think it might be overkill for this kind of game.

I reserve the right to change my mind down the road :)

IMO scripting would really give the engine flexibility, giving more control to the users, and it is a good way in implementing events, npc behavior etc... but in the end, it all depends on pfunked if he will integrate it or not :) (since FLARE is open source, you could make your own mod and integrate scripting )

I'm entertaining the idea, after thinking about what the mod community might do if it's very easy to change the game.

My long-term goal with Flare is to make several games.  After a few games are done, the core framework/engine will be tried and tested.  Perhaps when I start making game #2 I'll find that I need the flexibility granted by scripting.

Scripting will make the mod community happy, this will make the engine very flexible and a variety of games can be made out of it.

*anyway, i have a question.. is there any instruction how to build FLARE source in ubuntu?Maybe a list of dependencies would be nice..i really want to build this so i can mess around with the source ;)

jaderamiso,

pennomi posted this for getting Flare dependencies in Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev g++ svn

See his post here: http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/building-from-source-advice-requested#...

Thanks! The dependencies was the one that i all need. Not a fan in compiling in sh scripts, im make type of a person :). Probably ill create a makefile for people who prefer compiling this way

This (scripting language) is really important for me. I dislike C++ quite a lot. I'm developing a mod for Hexen, using VavoomC (a language similar to C++) and I would quit a long time ago if I didn't like Hexen. Most source ports use DECORATE language for modding, which is much less powerful. I have lots of ideas and need flexibility.

If you really want FLARE to be an engine liked by modders, you should integrate a language like Python or Lua.

A while ago I dabbled in modding Notrium (which is like a roguelike game except with realtime action). Notrium has easy and reasonably powerful homebrew language. If you are about to create your own custom modding language, you may want to take a look at Notrium.

From the FLARE website:
[quote]
I'm doing this because I'm having fun. Writing low-level game code is how my brain spends its spare cycles. And of the genres of game I'm interested in, 2D isometric action RPGs are probably the most interesting/ambitious. [/quote]

Imagine some people think in a bit higher level code, in game logic code. C++ is not a language good for scripting and game logic. It's okay for the engine, for performance-intensive bits, renderer and so on.

I really hate separate library dependencies.  The more dependencies it has, the worse of a game it will be to try to compile and run.

Maybe have a map editor / script engine.

I can't ever get 20 plus dependencies and dependency dependencies to work.  Did you see Battle for Wesnoth?  I used to play that game until the developers ruined it with dependency hunt.

If you are going to have any dependencies, you should just include them in the source code with the regular c files so you don't need to have them installed in your distribution or get them from somewhere else.  It just isn't reliable when the library developers are always updating and breaking things.

Well, anyway, I am having fun developing dependency hunt free wograld.  www.wograld.org .

An interesting idea - there were AI competition in StarCraft 1, and the problem arise - every command choose it's own language to implement AI - how to build universal adapter or scripting language? So as far as I know they made integration via ports to communicate with external AI module that controlled the game world. Any scripting language (even JavaScript via Node.JS) can easily communicate via ports, so You can choose what You like. One problem - performance, but I belive there are just a small part of code that's critical to performance, and this parts barely needs to be moddable.