BlobbieScript was designed and written to replace the archaic Easyact
system which had far outlived its usefulness. Easyacts were originally
designed by Dimwit (Aaron Buhr) and are the basis of mobprogs in Merc 2.2.
BlobbieScript is fully backward compatible with previously written easyact
code (and thus quite possibly with mobprogs). Despite the compatibility, the
features and power of the BlobbieScript engine are nowhere near as limited
as that offered by these older engines. BlobbieScript was designed and coded
from the ground up and is a bytecode language rather than a run-time
interpreter. A quick benchmark has shown that the engine can process 60,000+
lines of BlobbieScript per second. Optimizations are known and are scheduled
for sometime in the near future that could bump this up to about 80,000 lines
per second. To see a couple of examples of BlobbieScript, please see the
examples section.
Flaws in the Easyact Engine
The Easyact engine was a great engine in its hay day and served to be the
basis for many other MUD scripting engines; however, it is well past its
usefulness having reached somewhere around 10 years of age. Someone really
should have put it out of its misery a long time ago. The following outlines
the deficiencies encountered in the Easyact engine:
- Not real-time, variables are expanded macros
- Scripts are parsed on every run
- No looping constructs
- Nothing ensuring data is valid for duration of execution
- Poor support for expressions
- No concept of instance variables
- Code is a mess and poorly scalable
- No simple way to access internal data fields
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