While "AI.script" and "Other" (user-provided interpretation) were previously available to author scripts, version 5.3 adds support for the LUA scripting language. Created by a team at the university of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, LUA is an object-oriented scripting language that is fast and embeddable. Since its inception in 1993, it has gained a wide acceptance in the simulation and games market as a very powerful AI scripting solution.
Within the context of AI.implant, Lua scripting offers authoring capabilities that are equivalent to those of the original AI.script engine but also goes beyond what was possible before with the ability to create object and functions that can be used from multiple scripts. In addition to these direct programming benefits, the AI.implant team also took this opportunity to spruce up the script editor by adding syntax highlighting to the interface.
Highlighting makes all reserved keywords and pre-defined functions light up when they are valid, which facilitates the verification of scripts without always needing to run the test tool. When used in conjunction with the new Global Script capability, LUA lets users define re-usable functions or objects, then use them anywhere inside of character-specific scripts.
Other improvements done to the scripting and authoring engine in version 5.3 include the ability to create event handler trees (thus removing the need to write a script to respond to an event), use time-based events to execute actions or scripts at a specific time during the simulation, create for loops using tree components and finally return values from scripts to go back to decision trees quickly after taking a decision in a script. With all of these new authoring elements, adding artificial intelligence to your simulations just got even easier.
