Question for the professionals re: Scripting

    As a level designer, how much time do you spend with scripting?

    What language do you use (or if its proprietary, what is it most similar to?)

    Obviously this will vary between something like a single player designer and a multiplayer FPS designer, but just checking for a general consensus.

    I've got a resume in somewhere and they seem to be placing a lot of weight on scripting knowledge =(

    I personally spend a good chunk of time scripting using Unreal Kismet and our internal tool. I'd say I spend about 30% of my time doing scripting actually.

    I spent two years on scripting and that was fun as hell! I was scripting few levels for Call of Juarez Bound in Blood with our own script system based on actions, behaviors, conditions and so on. Very easy and powerful. I've seen a lot of maps from community that was stunning just because creating something fresh on our logic system.

    i find it kind of shady that the word scripting in game development is used for 2 different kind of things:

    1) interactivity and gameplay setup with entitys and tools

    2) programming in a script language

    i do TONS of 1) and none at all of 2) which one does your potential employer mean ? you should find out ! i have seen game egnines that replace 1 ) with 2 ) and i HATE those ...

    this is kind like in the good old days where some people referred to skinning as painting textures whilst other called skinning the binding of verts to bones and than there the smart asses that said that the latter is called rigging and whilst that is very similar/closely related to skinning its not the same !

    I had no idea people call setting up entity's etc also scripting, I always asumed they were talking about lua or other languages and stuff like valve's sounds, material & compile scipts :)

    I guess game dev lingo can vary a bit, according to 3d game textures book I have, skinning is creating a unique texture for a specific mesh (generally a non tiling texture.) and I have always used it that way.

    (Having worked most with Source where hammer also lists different model textures as skins)

    (altough I was a bit confused when Hessi commented on my "skinned by" comments on my portfolio as being wrong) and I call assigning vertices to bones just rigging as its part of setting up a bones rig.

    as far as i am concerned the correct lingo is as follows:

    skinning = binding verts to bones

    rigging = building helper nodes for fast selection or all kinds of other technical things that makes animating easier

    texturing = making textures for stuff no matter if unique unwrapped and layout out or tileable

    unwrapping = making a uv map no matter if unique or tileable / overlapping

    scripting = programming in a script language as in writing actual code

    gameplay setup = using entities and tools to achieve various forms of interactivity ingame.

    i am by no means the authority on this but seriously anything deviating from the above list is retarded ^^

    Quote

    As a level designer, how much time do you spend with scripting?What language do you use (or if its proprietary, what is it most similar to?)

    I think a lot of the confusion comes from level editors which contain gameplay scripting tools. Kismet, for example is a gameplay scripting tool for the Unreal Engine 3. It will really depend on the studio and what engine they use.

    When I worked on Ghostbusters, the Infernal Engine used Dante script, which is a variant of C++. Black window and script everything.

    [Blocked Image: http://www.infernalengine.com/images/content/tech/dante/dante_windows.png]

    I'm not a fan of scripting code like in Dante and much prefer tools like Unreals Kismet.

    I am going to learn some unreal script and stuff now that I am finished for a few months. There is a lot you can do with things like Kismet though. I am making a simple game in UDK and you can quickly make a good third person camera and all that stuff in Kismet.

    Yeah that was what originally threw me, scripting vs editor tools that do "traditional" scripting for you. I'm pretty familiar with Source and Kismet so I just threw together a small scripted gameplay segment and hoped for the best as I emailed that off to the HR guy that asked for "scripting examples" from me.

    Guess I over-worried, since I got offered the job

    I get someone else to do mine mainly Haven't actually done a huge amount yet but from what I can figure I pass my designs off to other people to do stuff on, then tweak rather than create.

    scripting in Cryengine is a peice of cake, same with Unreal and to a certain extent Source engine. All slightly different ways to do it but it's defo a big part of a level designers job these days.

    I know there are plenty of games out there that script using lua or thier own language but the common trend is to leave this for visual scripting (Kismet, Flowgraph<, Entity In/Out)

    I did some singleplayer levels at Grin. Visual scripting right in the 3d environment via entities. It's not very hard, tho becoming an actual expert is a lot of work. I usualy always needed help for some of the more complicated scripting. I prefer it if a company makes destinction between level designers and gameplay scripters. It's much more fun work for me to just create worlds.

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