Upgraded Combat and Animation System Deep Dive
Greetings, Adventurers!
We will upgrade our old combat and animation system to improve performance in areas with many players alongside the release of Season of the Guardian . This new system (which we affectionately call Slayer Script) will also make it easier to improve our combat going forward. We’ve done our best to keep the feel of the game the same, but would love to hear your feedback following these changes. From the development process to challenges, join Tech Lead Kevin Christensen for a deep dive into what this system means for the future of New World.
Slayer Script is a C++ based scripting language. It is natively compiled and dynamically loaded by New World in order to provide excellent performance as well as live updates to scripts. It can cause events (spawn enemies, play sounds, etc), respond to events (if an enemy dies, if a player enters a room, etc.), play animations, control movement, and more. A lot of work can be packed into a few lines of code.
New World has an enormous amount of objects that update frequently, making it difficult to efficiently use traditional scripting languages. A scripting language, for example Lua, is interpreted and cannot capitalize on hardware optimizations. While the execution performance of Lua is good, it would be used for hundreds of objects in New World. The overhead and memory cost was not going to cut it. We needed a solution to be as fast as possible with an acceptable impact to development iteration.
Our original character scripting system ran well during development, but eventually began to struggle with performance, memory, and runtime allocation as New World continued to grow. This led to Slayer Script as an alternative side project. Slayer Script reduced this cost to a few allocations, and its natively compiled code is very compact, which significantly reduced the runtime memory.
The initial idea was to use Slayer Script to control the player. The player is by far the most expensive game object in New
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