Best programming language for planning

General Discussions
#1

I’m making a development environment focused on games, and I needed some way to have people who know little about programming, write simple scripts for the programmers in the team to understand. I’m not looking for a object oriented approach. I need something like LUA or Python, something for the artists/writers to tell the programmers/engine-devs how they want an animal or sequence to work. I was thinking of just a text editor with syntax highlighting and letting them do whatever. But I would much rather an actual interoperated language, rather than gibberish that the developers can’t understand.

Keep in mind, the GUI for the development environment is done in JavaFX, so there are limitations to syntax highlighting and such.

#2

I can’t really tell what exactly you need, but honestly Lua is about as simple as it gets. You can embed it in Java as well.

#3

You could use JS and have JVM integration via Nashorn.
(Although I don’t blame you if you don’t use JS)

#4

Behavior trees.

#5

I do all my prototyping in Javascript because it allows for easy visualization using the HTML5 canvas and is highly portable.

However if your point is to make even non-programmers (we should give these people a special name, how about muggles? ;D) understand what’s going on then for god’s sake, please don’t use JS.
Honestly, I think Java is about as clear as it gets syntactically, but as others suggested you could go with LUA or even Python, both of those are nice languages and can be integrated to Java programs if needed.

If you don’t have to demonstrate what the actual code does though just explain the theory behind it then absolutely +1 on Roquen’s answer, go with behavior trees. :point:

#6

I only did a quick web-search, but look at the screen-shots in UE4 tools: https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?130-Behavior-Tree-Tutorial

and here’s an overview: http://www.altdev.co/2011/02/24/introduction-to-behavior-trees/