[Dev] Why is ARCC so good at being bad - Development

1-Because of its goal

ARCC is intended as a "easy to use" tool, to allow non-programmer to use it and do cool stuffs with it. It isn't. Most of the people using ARCC i've heard off already have programmation experience ; i've heard several event manager said to me "arcc is too hard for me, i just leave it to the expert". Want an example ? What seems more friendly to you :


[expr=var][math][expr]var[/expr]+ 10[/math][/expr]


var=var+10

It's not that hard to have programming available to everyone. Hell, even Barack Obama wrote a piece of code !. There is some games using code too, see http://codespells.org/ for example.

2-Because of its design

    Now that it's clear that ARCC is actually used by programmers, we could at least hope it's easy for them. Nope nope nope. While and if/switch are actually GOTO + LBL(side link :Why is goto bad ?). 70s would like their ultra high tech programmation paradigm back, please ! You have database with ARCC, too. They are so awesome you can't even delete an entry. So instead you need to add a flag for each entry to be sure it's active.
    Every script need to be triggered by a player. So you can't do a script who makes a bomb explodes whenever someone pass by, or a PNJ shouting things when player are close enough. You can have script continuously running, but it's tricky and it involves having a character logged on who launched the script and who can't do anything except running (every action he would do would interrupt him, and possibly any damage / affliction spell too).
    Last but not least, you can access source code to directly edit the whole script, but as soon as you have multiple-lines bbcode/calculation, it becomes almost impossible to do, so in the end you fall back to editing step by step your script ...

3-The documentation is severely lackluster

    All the doc is available here : http://forge.ryzom.com/wiki/ARCC_intro_EN. It's okay, at most. First, because ARCC is 3 year old or something, getting the doc written only recently show a pretty big problem (and if the event team has some doc, why doesn't they shared it before ?). Second, because there is still a lot of things missing in it (see advanced user guide for example).

    Third, because there is no good documentation about all the sheetid you need, for items (solved this partially listing armor/weapon, but there would be plenty of things to be done here), for creature (if you want to pop something) ... I had to dig through the translation file in the client to find them, and a lot of sheetname aren't available client side : basically 99% of decoration stuff like fences, barrel ..., almost all NPC (and it's a pain in the ass to spawn a naked standard NPC and get him some gear), and so on. Not to mention there is no list of the eventScript function you can use (the easiest i have found about this is to search directly the server code).

4-Security issues

    ARCC is based on PHP. I could stop this point right here, because the only true way to secure PHP is to uninstall it ...
    You can run an ARCC script pretty much anywhere on Atys as long as you know its scriptid. For example, i was able to buy beer from FH's bar in PR. Sure, it doesn't seems a big deal, like that. But this allows you to run NH/ranger[i think so for that, i need to check but can't log in yubo] teleport without beeing actually near them. You will also be able to use most of spawn scripts (as long as it's not a bot, based on /a eScript command).
    It's also worth knowing that evaluation is done on the fly, to have a preview of the message you'll see ingame. So, you can have funny situations like that (yes, it does actually use eval(), a php function known for its maximum security) :

Bonus : I don't really know where to put that, so :

This lead to http://menucool.com ... I guess you don't need to pay for a tool as long as it's used in a semi-private manner :|
So ... Enjoy, because if you want to use pocket world (if one day they will be available), you'll need to use that :)