Ok. Clearly this is a big issue.

Here's my take on your comments:

Saying that VC is what makes VERGE VERGE seems a little silly to me. I always envisioned VERGE as a means to create console-style RPGs. V2 expanded that by removing much of the hard-coded functionality, and placing it into VC2. VC and VC2 were pretty different. VC2 become far more complicated for a lot of users, and that's why (as far as I know) no one has made a full game with it. Heck, the developers couldn't even make a solid demo with it. It was very time consuming. But what do you get for all that? Flexability. Why is VC2 better? Because it let you do things you couldn't do before... control things you couldn't control before. Make games that weren't RPGs, or make RPGs that were much more detailed and original.

That, to me, was big step in the right direction. It had a large learning curve, but with that came flexability. You can't pay enough for flexability when it comes to game development.

Now everything is all about Windows. Migrating everything to windows required (almost) a complete re-write of the engine. It's a new engine. It has to be, because the way Windows does graphics functions, memory management, time-slicing, etc... is different from the way it was done in DOS. (yes... this is obvious). So the engine, and it's support utilities, and it's functions need to go through another migration to support the Windows environment.

This means we are at the third revision - and more if you count all of the splinter releases.

These are re-writes. Almost completely. As I remember it, VC2 was written almost completely from scratch, and then again to be ported to Windows. The functions may have the same names, and the syntax might be the same, but behind the covers, it's a different story.

So now we are looking at making other modifications. Stabilizing the code under Windows, and we are evaluating pulling out VC and replacing it with a Python.

Would vecna be offended? I doubt it. I think he would be excited at the prospect of adding functionality that is already built-in to Python, such as networking. vecna always struck me as a realist, with a side order of dreamer. He put VERGE together (with help from several people - Hahn being a cornerstone) to make Phantasy Star style games. He wrote a nifty scripting language to allow developers to build functionality. Would he say VC is what makes VERGE VERGE? I dunno. We'll have to wait for his answer. But frankly, it's not the syntax, the functions, or whatever... if it's anything, it's the fact that it had a scripting language. That's the thing that made VERGE attractive to me. It had a scripting language - period. It could have been BASIC, Pascal, whatever. The syntax wouldn't have mattered. The flexability, extensability, and usability were the key.

I think swapping VC for Python, as long as it can DO everything that VC did, why does it matter? After that it's all about syntax.

Does migrating the scripting language to Python mean that it's not VERGE? No. Why should it? This engine is many years old now. It's time for some evolution. It's time for innovation. I believe Python is one way to bring it up-to-date, add some features, create a little more stability, and flatten the learning curve a little.

Am I nostalgic about VC? Sure. I've spent a LOT of time in my past writing little VC functions to do this or that. I was all into "technical demos"... although I never released any, I had about 10 of these demos complete by the time I left. That amounted to a lot of lines of VC. But was it the syntax that made it interesting? Nah. It was the possibilities.

In my (humble) opinion, if Python can do everything that VC can do, and a lot more, then what's the problem?

And since I didn't go into too much detail about the "It's a whole new engine! It shouldn't be called VERGE anymore!" idea... I think that's a mistake. With change comes fear of losing the past. V1 will always exist, so long as we don't have a bunch of hard disk failures. Like a LOT of hard disk failures. So will V2. But the goal of this new version is the same:

Create an engine and a set of tools by-which people can create console-style RPGs (and other games) easily, and without heavy development experience or time.

This is accomplished by using the same methodology that we used back at the beginning. An engine, maps, a map & tile maker, some .chrs, a few tunes, and a scripting language. The methodology is the same. The guts are different. So what? I think it still follows the vecna's original vision -- one which all of us here are interested in maintaining. To maintain it will require updating the technology. Such is life. V2 was a complete re-write. So is this.

Evolution. Plain and simple.

-b

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