[crossfire] (Python)

[Brendan Lally]

On 10/10/05, Nicolas Weeger <
     nicolas.weeger at laposte.net
     > wrote:
>
      The rationale i see for using Python for item transformation is that
     >
      it's not a required feature to play the game. Same for bank actually -
     >
      you can play and do many things without the bank system. Same for gps,
     >
      and everything in Python scripts. It makes the game more fun, but the
     >
      core of the game does not depend on it.
     
Such a line of reasoning does make me uneasy. How many things are not
'required' to play the game? If you play as a monk, or a
dragon/fireborn, then weapons aren't required to play the game. The
usage of clocks isn't required by the game. If you never die or get
depleted and potions of life aren't required to play either. There are
dozens of things which are non-essential like this, but there comes a
certain point where, If you remove them, what remains?

Currently python is needed for banks, mail, slot machines, the new
guild system (if it gets turned on at some point), rings of occidental
mages, message boards & the gps (possibly some there stuff too). In
the near future it may include transformers also, and sess has been
playing with doing AI in python as well (an idea that seems to have a
great deal of merit to it).

At some point (and to my mind we are there already) playing on a
server without python is so much the inferior option, that it
shouldn't be considered as something that anyone would intentionally
do.

Therefore I would argue that python should be a mandatory dependency,
probably from the next stable version.