what about the future?

[Pocus]

Hi,

As an old Dom1-Dom2-Dom3 player who had quitted playing this awesome game since some years already, I wanted to know if there is any plan to have a true scripting language for Dominions,so that people could at last make kind of 'campaigns' scenarios, with triggers and events.

Or is it that dom3 progress is ended, baring bugs?

[Gandalf Parker]

It seems pretty much ended.
Illwinter is working on a new project (thats all we know other than they ARE working hard on it)

Some creative 3rd party fan work has allowed for games that have triggers and events. But only for server run MP games. Nothing yet that would work for solo play.

[Doo]

The future is bright.

[Pocus]

Thank you Gandalf for taking the time to answer. You truely were and still is instrumental in the success of the Dominions serie, believe me

That's a pity really that they never saw the interest a true scripting language could had for their game. It would have enabled the rabid fans here to build whole dynamic worlds, thus enabling Dominions to raise to a new success level.

Perhaps they will revisit the game once their new puppy is out, this is all I can wish.

[Zeldor]

lol

[Gandalf Parker]

A scripting language needs to be built into a game from the beginning IMHO.
I think that we are lucky we are getting as much modding access as we are considering that much of it was added to the game at a late date.

I do have hopes for scripting in their new project.

[DrPraetorious]

The dominions codebase is really neat in a lot of respects - but it also shows it's age. I don't have access to the source code, but just from diving into the built-in tables you can see the accumulated cruft of ages, and a lot of things are hard-coded or messy hacks which will cause accumulated headaches down the line if they try to keep working on it.

That said, it is amazing how extensible and stable it is (and how small a footprint it has, which is really a hallmark of an earlier era), but I can see why they wouldn't want to add true scripting support - either for user-modded events, user-modded maps/scenarios, or user-modded spells.

[lch]

Johan really comes from an earlier era, and it shows in the code, though I have to emphasize that I admire him for actually coding a whole game on his own. You'd weep when I tell you the specifications about the file format for the sprites, and why they are saved in the way they are. The game still is a derivative of an Atari Falcon ST game.

I'm more interested in what this new game that they apparently are working on will look like instead of having unreasonable expectations of big changes like a scripting engine to this one, which already has been asked for over and over again since forever. The refactoring this would require is pretty much insurmountable.

[Grand Stone]

So nobody know anything about the 'new' project? Nothing?

Man, Im currius

[Gandalf Parker]

Many know at least some of the new project. But its tightly bound up with NDA's (non-disclosure agreements). Its a tight house.
Even parts of Dom3 and Dom2 are still bound in NDA's