Work-in-Progress Spotlight
July 21st, 2012 by Felix36

Age of Python

By Impeached

One month gone by already? Wow, time flies. So who’s project are we looking at today? Well… it’s not so much a scenario designer, but a games programmer. He is less a map master and more a script wizard… He helped make that Dawn of Fantasy game… c’mon! You know who it is! That’s right, we’ve had a chance to sit down with Impeached.

So what project is our dear Impeached working on? Shall we guess again? No, it’s not Dawn of Fantasy 2… not it’s not Dawn of Fantasy 3… How can there be a four if there’s not a two or three? OK, I’ll just tell you. We’re dealing with the brand new and shiny Age of Python!

Now this isn’t a mod to add pythons to the game. No, it’s much more interesting than that. As I see it, Impeached is developing a tool to revolutionize Age of Kings design, just as Trigger Studio has done before. Age of Python will allow you to edit those painful triggers in friendly python code, allowing you to script triggers! This project is the successor to LuaTrig (also developed by Impeached) a similar tool but one that you must input Lua into. Python being a much more friendly language for the end user!

We’ve had a chance to sit down with Impeached and ask him a few questions. Let’s see what he had to say!
Quote:

You’ve had a few scenario design projects over the last couple of years, with Bloodsport II and A Pirate’s Life II, but now you’re moving more into code work. What inspired this?

When I started college in computer science two years ago, I found I had a lot less time for scenario designing and at the same time a growing interest in coding. I’ve learned so much now that I would almost always rather code something than make it.
I still pick up the scenario editor once in awhile though for old times’ sake… When I’m not on my Mac (yes, I have a Mac, and it’s awesome!). The Age of Empires II editor is so simple and easy.

There will probably be a lot of people reading this who know little about programming languages. Tell us a little about Python and why you chose it for this.

I chose Python because it’s such an easy and simple language. It uses whitespace to denote things instead of brackets and semicolons.
Most languages (brackets and semicolons):

if (this) {
  that();
}

Python:

if this:
  That()

Also, Python would be a great language for writing triggers. Here’s an example of how someone would make a set of triggers to create a group of units and change their attack/HP using Python & Age of Python: http://d.pr/n/Frmt

It sounds like the project is progressing well. When do you think we’ll see a public release?

Soon? It just needs a bit of work to be released as a command-line tool. The version with a graphical interface probably won’t end up happening… 🙁

Some of your scenario designs were pretty fun! Do you see yourself returning to scenario design anytime soon? Are you scheming some incredible trigger tricks?

Who knows? I’ve gone away for years at a time but I often come back and make a little something. And cool multiplayer custom scenarios keep me coming back too (especially Rambit’s, whenever he makes something he messages me and gets me to come back again :-D).

If I ever come back and make something… It will be something weird and crazy. I have a few tiny little ideas in my head.

It looks like we will be without screenshots today. I’ll have to leave you with no more than a small picture of python code! You’ll find it above, accompanying the introduction!