Chapter 12: Scripting

Overview

Todor Fay

After DirectX 6.1 shipped with the original DirectMusic, it quickly became clear from developer feedback that the content-driven approach was well-liked. Content creators and audio leads loved the fact that they could create complex sounds and wrap them up in Segment files.

However, a critical piece was still missing. There were still too many scenarios where it was necessary to write down instructions for the programmer, and some of these instructions could be quite complicated. For example: "When the cuddly monster dies, play a fill transition Segment and drop the groove level to 23 while playing byebye.sgt as a secondary Segment aligned to a beat boundary." Ouch! This has issues:

• That's a lot of information for the programmer to get right. Oh, and how many monsters did you say there were?

• If the content creator wants to change anything (for example, play a break transition), he or she can't just change the content and try again. No, the whole program needs to be recompiled with the change request.

• The above items slow down the development process and keep programmers and content creators perpetually irritated with each other.

Wouldn't it be nice if the content creator could say instead, "When the cuddly monster dies, please call the script routine CuddlyMonsterBuysFarm, and I'll take it from there." Thus, scripting was born…