Hi everybody,
I saw a presentation yesterday from Naughty Dogs' Dan Liegbol at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco.
Naughty Dogs has an history of Lisp usage. They were using GOAL in the past (their own Lisp variant) but they had dropped it after being acquired. You can read a bit about the story on Bill Clementson's blog: http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060118.html
Apparently, they were missing GOAL too much :) Dan's presentation was on how they used Scheme to write a significant part of their latest game, called "Uncharted: Drake's Fortune". It's a very high profile and high quality game that is attracting lots of attention right now and that was very well received by critics.
They have used they own implementation of Scheme to build the game. The Scheme code had multiple uses including: - Generate the C++ used to describe their data structures - Populate data tables at compile-time - Ensure validity of data (the code generating it could interact with their tools at compile-time) - Write their in-game scripts that would be compiled down to bytecode to be interpreted at run-time
In addition to programmers, designers and artists were also using Scheme to create the game. Their presentation slides should be available soon and will provide a bit more details.
Guillaume
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Hi again,
first of all, apologies to Dan Liebgold for butchering his last name in my previous email.
Dan just wrote me and clarified an interesting point. In his words: "We didn't use our own implementation of Scheme, we used PLT Scheme and layered a language on top of it (including a set of SRFIs)".
I think that it's very neat that they didn't have to write their own implementation. Hopefully, we might get more technical details soon.
Guillaume