Article: Scripting on the Xbox 360, Windows Phone, and Beyond!
by UberGeekGames
Scripting. It’s a recurring theme on the XNA forums: “Can I use Lua?” “Can I script on the Xbox 360?” “Scripting FTW! No, scripting FTL!”. Do a quick search for “scripting” on the XNA forums and you’ll find many threads with the preceding themes. There’s a lot of information about scripting, and it usually ends with “no, you can’t do scripting on the Xbox, and it’s probably not a good idea anyway”.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you what scripting is, a very useful type of scripting that I’ve been using more and more, and how you can make your own scripting system and use it effectively.
Article: Node-Based Scripting
by Blecki
Node-based scripting is not a traditional scripting language. And it's not a new idea, though it seems like people have forgotten about it. New systems appear - see Unreal Engine's Kismet - which people think are amazing new technologies. They aren't new; just amazing. I first encountered this scripting system in the quake engine. It was very crude, and limited, but it had all the basic properties of the system I am about to describe.
A brief note : Throughout this article, I use my own engine, Jemgine, and it's level editor for my examples. Jemgine is available at http://jemgine.codeplex.com You'll need to have XNA Gamestudio 3.1 installed to compile it, and to run the editor.
The target user of a node-based scripting system isn't the programmer, it's the level designer. The level designer might not know how to program. They might be constantly bothering a programmer to write scripts for them. Node-based scripting is an attempt to give the non-programmer level designer tools they understand and can use to create interesting behavior in a level without involving the programmer, and without having to learn a complex scripting language.
Curious Nick Yields
Nick Gravelyn learns about the yield keyword and uses the new discovery to show how to implemented a simple script engine. Crazy voodoo indeed.
What The Others Wrote
Some random blog post coverage:
David Amador teases at a custom script language running on the 360 in I MAED A CUSTOM SCRIPT LANGUAGE FOR MY XNA ENGINE
Tom Looman writes about Level & Content management, Part 2
Shawn Hargreaves is Predicting the Future and reflects on the State of the XNA Framework
Nick Gravelyn explains his C# Twitter quiz (“C# pop quiz. Without testing, what is the value of x here: ‘var x = 10; x += x--;’?”) and Visual Studio 2010, XNA, and you