Monday 10 October 2011

Implementing AGS Script in C#

Previously for AGS conversions, XAGE would use a series of workarounds in order to shoehorn the AGS script into the XAGEScript. As discussed in the last post, this method was becomingly increasingly brittle and it was not easy to know how well a particular game would run until after a conversion was attempted.

Since moving to the new C# based scripting, there are still a number of workarounds required (offering index-based accessors, rather than XAGE's preferred unique string ID), though it is unavoidable that the two engines have converged even further. It makes sense therefore to offer an interface for much, if not all of the existing AGS script in order for our new C# script to compile. This has now mostly been done, and gives us a new metric for monitoring development progress.



Current progress stands at 8%, though in reality the figures will soon be somewhat higher. Much of the functionality already exists in XAGE (walking, talking, animating etc.), I just need to add the relevant hooks to make them usable via the new interface. A fairly low percentage implementation, say 30-50%, should suffice for the majority of games, with the more esoteric functions given lower priority.