Many games separate the level design and story line design from development by attaching scripts to objects within the game world. I am looking to do something similar, albeit not in a game, to control the 'passive mode' or 'screen saver' mode of an application.
The requirements thus far are:
- Specify time lines for various invocations
- Ability to script simultaneous actions - specify separate time lines for different aspects of the application, e.g. one for the main application, and another for a status bar
- Ability to interface with the target application, which is written in c++. Function annotation or mapping.
- Fairly human readable - non developers should be able to modify it
Based on the above:
- What sort of scripting language best fits the bill?
- Is a scripting language even necessary?
- Are there libraries which provide this sort of functionality?
More information:
The app under development is designed to be of use in two different scenarios: one with active user interaction, and another in passive mode, which is sort of like a screen saver mode, and is intended to run in auto-pilot on large screens - view only.
At present, the application running in passive mode interacts with various user interface elements, by invoking the functions which user interactions would have called. These invocations are manually timed and called; hard coded within the source of the application.
The motivation behind exposing this as a script is for different customer deployments to be separately configurable, because we foresee that each customer will want different sequences of actions to happen with the application running in passive mode.
