[MSLUG] Naughty Dogs used Scheme to create their latest game

Guillaume Germain guillaume.germain at gmail.com
Sat Feb 23 13:14:39 EST 2008


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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