Item Use Scripts

I thought adding scripting support would be really complicated, so I postponed it until the NPC milestone. But today I read how ridiculously easy it is to add scripting support to a java program.

So I decided to add script-controlled item use now. I decided to use Javascript as scripting language on the server. Not just because it is supported out-of-the-box by Java but also because I want to avoid to add a third language to the project. The client uses JS, the database uses JS, content files are almost JS (JSON, to be precise), so why not use JS for content scripting?

Doing that was nothing compared to the pain we have on Manasource with the LUA scripting system for Manaserv. There we have to write a wrapper function for every single function we want to expose to the scripting engine. The Java scripting system, on the other hand, can pass any Java objects to a script and then lets the script call any public methods on them without requiring any boilerplate code whatsoever. Just passing the PlayerCharacter object as "user" to the item use scripts allows me to do all sort of interesting stuff.