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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I feel like his opinion makes sense for first party code, but what if you want to support mods? I don't really have time to develop them anymore but I did a couple in QuakeC back in the day (I'm old) and really enjoyed it. IIRC it had lots of domain specific niceties like native vector types. One slightly hilarious thing is any loop that looped more than 100k times was killed with an infinite loop error. Actually saved me a couple of times.

I feel like if there was a nice modern statically typed language that was easy to embed I would go with that. Something like Dart maybe. But I don't think that's easy to integrate.

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Was a lot of the functionality of Quake done in QuakeC or was that scripting language added for the sole purpose of allowing for mods to the game?.

I think scripting languages are a very bad idea for the core functionality of a game and I see no benefit to them. If its done after you have nailed down all your core mechanics and just want to add mod support for things such as player created maps then I think that's fine.

That means that a scripting language should only be added towards the very end of a project. Adding it towards the beginning when you don't even know your core mechanics yet seems crazy to me since I see no benefit to it.

The engine was all C. QuakeC was used to script the game logic - how weapons behave, doors open, items move around, etc. It was reasonably powerful. You could make grappling hooks, proximity mines, etc.

I guess the core mechanics of Quake were very obvious. It wasn't a very innovative game in that sense; basically identical to Doom but with way fancier graphics, controls and so on.

QuakeC was powerful enough to create mods like Quess (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD2Qz_hH2U4) and Quake Rally (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg0hTSLE-NM). Although the latter was really pushing the limits of the engine.

And lest we forget, Reaper Bot, the thing that made PvE deathmatch a reality.

To this day I'm amazed that so much cool stuff was done in QuakeC despite the language not even having arrays...

Never made a game (want to!) but I would think that scripting language support would be downright fantastic for E2E testing.

The .NET runtime[1] and C# compiler[2] are both pretty easy to embed.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tutorials/netc...

[2] https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/blob/main/docs/wiki/Scripti...

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