Re: Edit and Continue: Part 2

[Don Hopkins <dhopkins@...>]

Wow, thanks for pointing out that article! It's detailed, accurate, and 
illustrates many important points.

I worked on The Sims (the original version 1) and the Edith visual 
programming tool, for programming "SimAntics" code to control The Sims 
behavior.
(I'm the one who named the visual programming tool "Edith", after Edith 
Bunker (the first Sims character), and also for "EDIT House".)

The reason "edit and continue" and investing development effort in 
programming tools is so important is that it optimized the AI 
programmers' and designers' time.
The downside of rolling your own visual programming language is that you 
have to roll your own tools, debuggers, etc, which is a huge costly effort.
If we did it again from scratch, I would choose Lua as the underlying 
scripting language, and write a custom special purpose language and 
visual programming tool on top of that.
I don't think that it would be necessary to change the Lua language 
itself to support edit and continue, just write the visual language 
interpreter in Lua and integrate it with the application code in the 
right way.

Here is a video that demonstrates the visual programming tools in The 
Sims, which are extremely fun to use, although quite quirky and tricky:
http://www.DonHopkins.com/home/movies/TheSimsPieMenus.mov

You can see how it lets you interactively browse and edit the running 
code inside the live game.
Edith has additional debugging, breakpointing, tracing, monitoring and 
profiling tools that I didn't get around to demonstrating in that video.
Unfortunately, Maxis never released Edith, but there are some externally 
developed tools like iffpencil2, for editing SimAntics code through a 
less graphical interface (more like machine language than a visual 
programming language).
But unfortunately the external tools aren't integrated into the live 
game, thus can't provide "edit and continue".

Here's a piece of interactive agitprop I programmed in SimAntics: the 
Dumbold voting machine for The Sims (showing a screen dump of some code 
in iffpencil2 at the end):
http://www.dumbold.com/dumbold

We had some summer interns who picked up Sims programming pretty 
quickly, and some of the fans figured it how to program Sims object a 
lot better than anyone at Maxis ever could.
Check out Slice City (a plug-in that has its own sub-plug-in add-ons) 
and the Weather Machine!
http://www.SimSlice.com
http://www.simslice.com/Slicecity.htm
http://www.simslice.com/Slicecityaddons.htm
http://www.simslice.com/support-ipweatherseasonspage.htm

   -Don


Dmitriy Iassenev wrote:
> http://aigamedev.com/reviews/the-sims-ai
> please read section "Custom Scripting Language"
>
> "...The interpreter is required to implement edit and continue..."
>
> Do we have a chance in the future to have a version of Lua with Edit
> and Continue feature? And what are the reasons for not to implementing
> it? How many changes current code base requires for this?
>
>
> Yours respectfully,
>
> Dmitriy Iassenev, iassenev@gsc-game.kiev.ua
>  Phone (mobile): +380958392212
>   ICQ: 72752187
>    GSC Game World - Ukraine, Kyiv
>     http://www.stalker-game.com, http://www.gsc-game.com
>