Re: [pygame] Use of PyScheme for game projects

[Tim Ansell <mithro@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Good idea!

We are also using pyScheme in our project Thousand Parsec,
http://www.thousandparsec.net/tp/ 

We needed a way to transfer "calculation methods". When designing a new
ship all the properties of the ship need to be calculated when
components are added or removed. For example the mass property is
defined to be a simple addition of all the components mass property.
While more advanced properties like speed use more complex calculations.

Each server can have there own set of properties and the client can
still calculate them without asking the server after each click.

We decided to us a subset of Scheme as the language to transfer
calculations.

The reason we choose scheme is because there is an implementation in
almost every language under the sun. For example there are about 20
implementations in C, about 3 in Python, about 6 in Java, 1 in Visual
Basic. It is also trivial to implement a basic Scheme interpreter. There
are also pretty good scheme learning environments like DrScheme and
MzScheme.


The implementation was pretty painless and has worked really well.

Hope this helps.

Tim Ansell

On Sat, 2006-07-15 at 22:15 -0700, andrew baker wrote:
> Howdy,
> 
> I've been pondering alternative methods to allowing unknown persons to
> submit game code in my game engine, e.g. player created levels,
> characters, monsters and items, but of course sandboxing Python code
> is nontrivial.  I've hit upon using a Scheme interpreter in Python to
> potentially solve this problem, with a possible variation on parsing
> to make the Scheme code appear more Pythonic.  Has anyone had similar
> success or failure or a better understanding of Scheme than me who
> explain why this is A) awesome or B) teh suck. 
> 
> And, yes, I know how daft it may seem to embed another interpreted
> language inside an interpreted language, but I'm expecting rather
> small Scheme patterns, and Python in its current state simply cannot
> be sandboxed, and I think I might actually hate C++. :D 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -- 
> Andrew Ulysses Baker
> "failrate"