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[basic.syntax]

On ‎4‎/‎9‎/‎2019 at 12:47 PM, Tyko said:

I'd be all in favor of an in-game graphical scripting system that let me write automation programs though. Something that involved dragging and dropping decision points into a sequence then typing parameters into each of the decision points. finally stringing them all together into a series of programs that would control an entire flight.

That sounds like an expansion of the Making History expansion. (lol)   The UI already exists.  Some form of this could help a player manage multiple flights with multiple planetary transfers.  

[Tyko]

22 minutes ago, basic.syntax said:

That sounds like an expansion of the Making History expansion. (lol)   The UI already exists.  Some form of this could help a player manage multiple flights with multiple planetary transfers.  

LOL...yea, I was wondering if they could leverage some of the MH mission builder code for this. I've never used Mission Builder, but I'd definitely use a maneuver programmer if it worked well. 

In some ways this is like KOS, which is very powerful, but to make it more player friendly i was envisioning a GUI based programming system instead of a text environment.

[Dunbaratu]

The Making History system is essentially a finite state machine (FSM) with no memory other than "I am at this node right now".  It would be exceptionally hard to make a script out of that.  There's a reason people use FSM generator tools when they use FSMs in the real world, like when making language parsers, rather than writing the FSM directly from scratch.  Being graphical doesn't always make things easier.  Any proper scripting system will need some kind of memory to say "if X then STORE this value in A", and later on, "If that value we stored beforehand in A was this, then do that."  The Making history expansion was a pure FSM which means it lacks that, and this is the main reason it was painful to use to try to make any sort of real mission out of it.  The only "memory" an FSM can have about an if/else fork you are doing now is in the form of cutting and pasting a duplicate of the entire tree of events that comes after that fork so you have two variants of the rest of the "program" from there on down that are almost identical except for that one node in the future you want to behave differently based on this if/else you are doing now.

I gave up on making missions with Making History once it became clear that there was no capacity to remember a variable and read it later.  The massive duplication required to get anything meaningful out of a manually built FSM was too painful at that point, and I think a scripting system based on the same FSM engine would have the same problem.

GUI programming *is* a thing, and people have done it, but you have to also have memory and variables.  The pure FSM of Making History doesn't cut it.