Rebirth scripting engine - fp, 3d and other stuff

[Sir Warwick]

Please please please add floating point this time round.

Along with using libraries for a 3D environment:
sin/cos/tan/asin/acos/atan,sqrt (I know 3 of these exist in X3, but nowhwre near enough and fixed point hack yield horrible overly complex and slow code)

Also 3d transform matrix operations and library of common transforms:
Object local to universe and visa versa
Rotate by a euler angle.
Rotate by a quaternion (w,x,y,z whiuch can be though of as a polar euler).
All this stuff already exists in any 3d engine.

Object collections and associations:
Why when in the game engine a ship will have an associated collection of wares it is carry is the only way to actualy determine everything that it is carrying or has installed is to trawl through every possible ware and ask the ship how many it has?

All of this stuff really sucks up performance needlessly.

So this round - please expose full collection and association functionality so that scripts do not have to do this kind of brute force interrogation.

As well as arrays, perhaps some kind of ID keyed collections to enable script to carry out far more effecient oranisation and lookup of data. I am sure theere must be such a mechanism in your game engine for this - perhpas that could be exposed?

Full programmer defined objects may be a step too far to implement, but this would of course hugely help and if core game object were exposed as object with properties it would make for *far* easier and more maintainable scripting.

Editing stuff is game is really nice and impressive, but Im not sure if its worth it if this harshly limits what can be done.

[Myrsnipe]

Agreed, exposing hardcoded methods would be of great benefit.

Best case scenario would be if they've ditched their homebrew stuff and just implemented something like lua, but it's to late in the development cycle to change anything that drastic

It would be a pleasant surprise tough if it turns out they actually use lua, and just gave us a normal console output from the interpreter so we could just use textpad / eclipse / notepad / emacs / vi (for you freaks out there) etc rather than having to use an ingame editor